The Campground You Loved and Can't Find Again
You pulled into a state park somewhere in the Texas Hill Country in October three years ago. The site backed up against a creek, the electric hookup was 50-amp, the cell signal was actually usable, and the rate was $28 a night. You were there four nights. You've been trying to remember the name ever since — you know it was off US-281 somewhere, maybe north of Johnson City, maybe south. You've searched your photos and the only location data is "Texas." You've looked at Google Maps and there are eleven state parks within the radius you remember driving.
You won't find it. But if you'd had this template, you'd open it right now, filter by State: Texas, sort by Rate, and have the entry in thirty seconds.
Stay, Rate, Total Stay Cost: The Budget That Tracks Itself
Stay (number of nights), Rate (nightly), Total Stay Cost (calculated). Three fields that turn your trip journal into a financial record. After twenty trips, you know your average nightly cost, your most expensive nights, and whether the $65 full-hookup resort campground or the $18 dry-camping BLM site fits your actual travel pattern.
Driving Distance per leg feeds the total mileage picture. When you're planning the same route two years later and trying to remember whether the segment from Albuquerque to Carlsbad was a comfortable day or a grind, the field tells you it was 274 miles — a comfortable day in the spring, a long pull in July heat.
Camp Site Number and Hookups: The Details That Change Everything
Camp Site # and Hookups are the fields that make a repeat visit actually useful. A campground you loved is only lovable if you can get site 14 again — the one with the slide-out clearance on both sides, the fire ring that's not right next to the neighbours, and the shade tree on the west side that makes the sunset hour bearable. Site 34 at the same campground has a concrete pad that your levelling blocks don't handle well and the hookup is on the wrong side of the rig for your cord.
Hookups captures the electrical service (30-amp, 50-amp, full, water/electric only, dry), which determines whether your second air conditioner can run. At 95°F in Arizona in August, that's not a minor detail.
Camp Ground Information and Comments are the two narrative fields where the institutional knowledge lives: the dump station is at the entrance on the right, not the one Google Maps shows; the camp host in the loop by the lake rents kayaks; cell service is Verizon only, AT&T is dead; quiet hours are enforced at 9 PM, not 10 PM. This is the information that turns a good stay into a great one the second time, and it doesn't exist anywhere else.