Picture a few weeks with the length of New Zealand's South Island in front of you. Maybe it is a camper-van, maybe it is a motorbike with a tent bungeed to the back - either way the daydream is the same: green hills, empty roads, and a different view out the window every night.
The daydream is the easy part. The planning question is the hard one, and it is the same whichever way you are travelling: where do we sleep, where do we fill up, and where do we buy food? On a route that runs over a thousand kilometres through some genuinely remote country, "we'll sort it out as we go" is how you end up parked in a lay-by at dusk with an empty tank and no dinner.
Here is how that whole plan comes together in PitStopper, using a real end-to-end South Island tour.
Start with a route
The route itself is drawn somewhere else. This one was built in BRouter - a free router that is brilliant for exactly this kind of thing, because you can pick a vehicle profile and let it string together the good roads down the island. It comes out at 1,025.8 km, from the deep south up to Marlborough at the top.
BRouter hands you a GPX file, and that is all PitStopper needs. Drop the GPX in and the track appears on the map, ready to be interrogated.
Find the campsites
This is a camping trip, so the first question is the beds - or the pitches. Set the search radius to 1 km, open the Accommodation group, and tick Campgrounds. PitStopper looks for every campsite within a kilometre of the line and drops a marker on each.
Fifty-three of them, strung the whole way down. A kilometre is the right radius for this: wide enough to catch the holiday park that sits just off the main road, tight enough that you are not being shown places an hour's detour away. If you wanted more choice you could tick Hotels, Motels, Hostels and Guest Houses too - they are all sitting right there in the same group with their own counts - but for this trip, campgrounds it is.
Fifty-three markers on a map is a lovely thing to look at. It is not, however, something you can act on. You cannot ring a marker.
Turn it into a shortlist you can act on
This is the step that turns "look at all these" into a plan. Export → Printable Report takes everything you have found and lays it out as a proper table.
Every campsite, in the order you will reach them, with:
- Distance from start - so you can see the day-by-day shape of it. Central City Camping Park is 1.5 km in (that is Invercargill, right at the start); Gore Motor Camp at 70 km; Lake Hawea at 296 km; the Haast places out at 420-odd; Lake Paringa on the West Coast at 472.
- Distance from track - how far you actually have to leave the road. Jackson Orchard is 70 m off it; the Luggate Cricket Club ground 178 m.
- Website and phone - the bit that makes this useful.
Because that is the workflow. You print the report (or save it to PDF), and now you have a shortlist you can investigate. Open a campsite's website, decide whether it is your kind of place, ring ahead to check they have space. Tick off the ones you fancy and ignore the rest. You will spot the character of the trip in the names alone - freedom-camping spots, a cricket club that lets vans stay, DOC campsites (the ones with doc.govt.nz links are Department of Conservation sites, often the most scenic and the most basic), and full-service holiday parks with hot showers.
One honest note: the data comes from OpenStreetMap, so it is only as complete as the last mapper made it. You will see the odd entry that just says camp_site because nobody has typed in a name yet, and not every place has a phone number on file. That is fine - the report gets you 90% of the way, and a quick search fills the gaps.
Come back later for the rest
You do not have to decide everything in one sitting. The route stays put, so you can come back to PitStopper any time and ask a different question.
A few evenings later, the question is fuel. Type "petrol" into the category search, tick Petrol Stations, and - because a fuel stop wants to be right on your road, not a kilometre away - drop the radius right down to 130 m.
Twelve stations the entire way down. That is the number that matters on a route like this: through Haast and the West Coast the gaps between pumps are long, and seeing them laid out in advance is the difference between a relaxed fill-up and a nervous coast downhill.
Then supermarkets, for restocking the cool-box. Tick Supermarkets under Shopping and the green trolleys appear - thirteen of them, mostly the little Four Squares that anchor every South Island town.
Click one and PitStopper tells you more than where it is. Here is a Four Square with its opening hours (Mo-Su 07:30-20:00) and, in red, the line that earns its keep on a tour: "Last before 97.57 km gap." That is PitStopper warning you this is your final chance to shop for nearly a hundred kilometres. Buy the milk now. On a supported cycling trip you would call that a resupply gap; in a camper-van it is the difference between dinner and instant noodles.
Same map, different traveller
Nothing above is specific to a camper-van. Swap the van for a motorbike and the workflow is identical - the questions are just sharper, because you carry less and range further between stops. There is even a one-tap Motorcyclist preset now (you can see it sitting in the Quick Presets in the shots above) that turns on fuel, mountain passes, cafes, ferries and bike-friendly stops in a single click.
The point of all of it is the same: a line on a map is a nice idea, but a tour is a hundred small decisions about where to stop. PitStopper turns the line into those decisions - a shortlist of campsites you have actually vetted, a fuel plan that respects the empty stretches, and a shopping run that never leaves you hungry.
Draw the route, find the stops, and when you are happy with the plan you can take the whole lot with you - export your chosen stops as waypoints or a POI layer for the app you navigate with. Then all that is left is the driving.
Header photo by Athithan Vignakaran on Unsplash.
