>>193615>I take it you HAVE to travel a certain amount of miles a day so you know you'll get to an area where you can camp?Not at all, especially in the west. Normally I would just ride until an hour or two before sunset and start looking for someplace to camp at that point. As sunset got closer, my standards would drop. Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Kentucky and Virginia all had places to camp pretty much everywhere. Montana, Wyoming and Missouri had a lot of fence-in private land, which made it a bit harder, but not impossible.
Requiring a water source at your campsite limits you a lot. I had a capacity of 4 liters, and tried to have close to all of that towards the end of the day.
Some people find places to stay through a website called
warmshowers.org, and book motel rooms. These people do commit themselves to a given number of miles.
This shot is from one of my favorite campsites on the trip. In Southern Wyoming I just went off the road half a mile on a dirt road and slept on the range, surrounded by cow patties.
