My favorite place to camp is a spot in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada, outside the town of Mammoth Lakes, called the Inn at Benton Hot Springs. The small hotel has a private campground with 12 sites out back, and each comes with its own mineral springs-fed hot tub. You can pitch a tent or park your van on a spacious plot with views of the mountains and then soak things in.
But like all dreamy and incredibly popular campgrounds, securing a site here requires a heavy dose of luck or major advance planning. If you can only make it on a weekend, you’d better book it a year out.
It wasn’t always this hard. Pre-COVID you could get a spot at Benton relatively easily—they didn’t take online bookings, so you had to call the front desk and ask when they had a campsite available. But then word got out (I have myself to blame, in part, for that, because I’ve written about it in travel stories), and during the pandemic, the inn introduced an online reservation system, which allows bookings up to a year in advance. So fully booked it now is.