Product Requirements Document · Interactive Tool
A client-side planner that turns your trip parameters into a day-by-day skeleton and the right searches, with no backend, no login, and no data collected.
The problem Planning a multi-stop camping road trip is a juggling act: a fixed reservation you have to build around, a daily drive limit, rest days, must-see stops, family on the way, and everyone’s different idea of fun. Generic planners do not capture your constraints, and staring at a blank AI box is its own kind of stuck. Plenty of people, though, just want one campground for a few nights and nothing more. |
The solution A structured form with two paths. A quick campground search (area plus how many nights) for simple trips, and a full trip builder that captures your real parameters and lays out a day-by-day rhythm from your own rules, with tailored lookups and a print-ready plan. An optional one-click prompt hands the open-ended writing to an AI if you want a polished paragraph version. |
Turn a pile of trip constraints into a usable plan in about two minutes, without an account and without giving up any data, and meet two very different users in the same tool: the “just find me a campground” person and the “plan my whole route” person.
Campers and road-trippers. Quick-search users want one area and a number of nights. Trip-builders have a reservation or two, a list of places with different priorities, a driving comfort level, and a set of activities the group cares about.
This is the part worth understanding, because it is a deliberate architecture, not a limitation I hid.
| Layer | What it does | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|
| The form | Collects the trip frame, three pace sliders (drive cap, days-before-rest, total rest), a public-lands lean, repeatable reservation and destination rows with priorities and notes, and the activity, see, eat, logistics, and camp-style checkboxes. | Browser |
| The planner | On “Build,” ~15 lines of JavaScript lay out a day-by-day rhythm: it pins reservation nights to their dates, marks the depart and return days, inserts rest days on your cadence, distributes your prioritized destinations across the explore days, and weaves in your chosen activities so each day reads like a real plan. | Browser |
| The lookups | For every box you check, it builds a targeted link (Recreation.gov for camping, Mountain Project for climbing, RoadsideAmerica for oddities, fire-restriction and road-condition searches for your area, and so on). | Browser |
| The output | A printable plan (Save / print), the campground searches, and an optional AI prompt that packages every parameter so any LLM can write the polished version. | Browser |
The honest split
The page does the structured scaffolding, the parts that are just logic: ordering days, honoring reservations, respecting the drive cap, building the right searches. The open-ended reasoning, exact routing, real drive times, and picking specific campgrounds, is what an LLM is good at, and that happens either in your head with the links provided, or by pasting the generated prompt into your own AI. The tool is honest about which half is which.
A choice with a reason
The tool is a single static page on GitHub Pages. That means no server, which has three consequences I leaned into rather than fought: it costs nothing to run, it collects and stores nothing about the person using it, and it cannot safely hold an API key (any key in a public page is visible to every visitor). So the live LLM call and saved accounts are intentionally out of scope for this version. It fits the same no-PII, minimum-data principle I hold across my tools.
| Today (static, free, private) | The signed-in version (separate build) |
|---|---|
| Quick campground search by area and nights, opens Recreation.gov. | Live availability checked and a specific campground suggested. |
| Day-by-day skeleton from your rules, printable. | The AI writes the full itinerary in-app, no copy-paste. |
| Optional AI prompt you paste into your own tool. | Trips saved to an account and shareable. |
| No login, no data, no cost. | Auth + database + a serverless function holding the API key; real hosting, real cost, real data responsibility. |
The upgrade is a deliberate decision, not a default, because accounts mean becoming the custodian of users’ data. The static version ships value today without that weight.
Someone lands on it, either grabs a campground search in fifteen seconds or builds a full multi-stop skeleton in two minutes, prints it or hands the prompt to their AI, and walks away with a real plan, having signed up for nothing and handed over nothing.