Vanlife Planner

Plan a road trip in a rooftop tent, a campervan or a motorhome, and let your assistant check every night, route and arrival time against the rules of the road and the hour of sunset.

A plugin for TREK, the self-hosted trip planner: legal nights, sunset-safe arrivals, routes, schedules, supplies, the price and amenities of every place, the hosts' contacts and where each night stands (spotted, in discussion, booked, dropped) — as MCP tools any assistant connected to TREK can call (ChatGPT, Claude…), as warnings in the planner, as chips on each place (hover card, places list) and as a small panel at the foot of the place view.

Screenshots

Related MCP server: parks-mcp

What it does

The vehicle is a setting, and the rules follow it. A rooftop tent has to be unfolded in daylight, and opening it anywhere other than a campsite or a farm that hosts campers is camping. Sleeping inside a van or a motorhome without setting anything out is parking in Italy (Codice della strada art. 185), so a motorhome area is fine there, while Tyrol forbids sleeping in a vehicle outside campsites.

• Trip check — day by day, at four levels (blocking / to fix / to verify / info): arrival at the night later than sunset minus a margin (computed for the exact date and place); a stop visited on its closing day or outside the hours quoted in its notes; a check-in window or minimum stay not met; a night the vehicle may not use; a farm night where farm camping is illegal (South Tyrol); impossible times; a shopping detour over the limit; nights in a row without water; a place that refuses the vehicle, the dog, or the vehicle's height, length or weight.

• Nights — candidates between the evening's last visit and the next morning's first stop, from OpenStreetMap and, if the instance enables it, park4night; ranked by legality, price and real detour.

• Routes — the road of each day with Valhalla for the vehicle (height; length and weight for a motorhome), no tolls except on the motorway days you choose; also two route profiles in the planner's route toggle.

• Schedules — start and end of every stop from real drive times.

• Supplies — supermarkets, fuel and drinking water along the day's route, with that day's hours.

• Price and amenities — per night or per person, dog fee, height/length/weight limits, and the amenities park4night and OpenStreetMap know (dog, water, electricity, toilets, shower, dump station, wifi, bins, laundry, pool, shop, bakery, restaurant or snack bar, bar, mobile data, playground, barbecue, gas bottles, LPG, vehicle wash, open in winter, rooftop tent accepted). The price is TREK's own field; the rest is kept on the place by the plugin. Unknown amenities are filled automatically from OpenStreetMap (the campsite mapped within 150 m) and from park4night (the place a park4night link points to), citing the source; a value a person recorded is never overwritten.

• Hosts and nights — the contact of each host (e-mail, phone, WhatsApp, website, name, languages, preferred channel), filled from the place's own notes, OpenStreetMap and park4night; a log of what was asked and answered; the status of every night, kept in TREK's own bookings; and a ready-to-send information request to a host, in English then French (Italian or German on request), built from what is still unknown about the place. The plugin never sends it: the assistant shows the exact text and waits for your go.

Timed access, booking, toll

Some places can only be reached at certain hours, or not without a ticket: a mountain toll road closed to cars after 09:00, a valley road open to cars only in the evening, a car park with time slots to book. Each place can record, in the widget or with vanlife_place set (null clears a field):

Example, a mountain toll road: {"access_before": "09:00", "booking_required": true, "booking_url": "https://toll-road.example.com", "toll_amount": 30, "toll_currency": "EUR"}. The trip check then says, from the arrival time of the stop (its own time, or the time the day's drives give): an arrival after access_before is blocking, an arrival before access_after is to fix, a booking with none recorded in TREK's bookings or the stop's notes is to verify, with the link. vanlife_day schedule moves the proposed departure so every access is met. The toll is added to that day's budget in vanlife_plan_trip. Each recorded field shows as a small chip on the place: Before 9:00 AM, Booking, Toll €30.00.

MCP tools

Advertised to assistants as plugin_vanlife_<name>; the MCP client needs the opt-in plugins:use scope.

TREK accepts 8 tools per plugin: the eighth place is left free on purpose.

No tool books, pays or writes to anyone. vanlife_night records what you declare, and every tool that deals with hosts tells the assistant to show you the exact text and wait for your explicit validation.

Works with ChatGPT and Claude

The tools live on TREK's own MCP server, so any assistant that speaks MCP can use them.

1. In TREK, an admin installs and turns on the plugin (Admin → Plugins) and enables MCP access.

2. In the assistant, add TREK as a connector or custom app: the MCP address is https://<your-trek>/mcp, and the sign-in must grant the plugins:use scope (no client preset asks for it, so request it by name). ChatGPT: Settings → Apps → create an app with that address. Claude: Settings → Connectors → add a custom connector.

3. Ask in plain words: "Check trip 1 for my rooftop tent", "Find a cheaper legal night near day 4", "Draft a message to the host of day 6 asking about dogs and late arrival".

After a plugin update, the assistant keeps the old tool list until it is told to reload it: in ChatGPT, open the app's settings and click Refresh tools (Actualiser les outils); in Claude, reconnect the connector.

Where it shows in TREK

• Warnings banner — blocking and to-verify points, in the user's language.

• Place chips — the night's status first (Booked ✓ green, In discussion orange, Dropped red, on places that have a booking), then the price and one chip per amenity the place has (dog, water, electricity first), plus a red chip listing what it lacks when that rules it out: the places list, and the map's hover card once an admin lets the plugin in (Admin → Default user settings → Plugin info on places).

• Place panel — a widget at the foot of the place view shows the night's status, the host's contact (e-mail, phone and website as links, last exchange) and the amenities; it edits the amenities and the contact, and has a Fill the trip's amenities button. Opening a place with nothing recorded looks it up once.

• Settings — TREK's native forms: per user (vehicle, dimensions, dog, target and ceiling price, sunset margin, language…) and per instance (park4night on or off, default language).

Setup

1. Install the plugin from its zip (Admin → Plugins), and grant the permissions it asks for.

2. Optionally, in Admin → Plugins → Instance settings: turn park4night off, choose the default language.

3. Each traveller sets the vehicle, its dimensions, the dog, the prices and the sunset margin in Settings → Plugins.

4. To use the tools from ChatGPT, Claude or another assistant, connect it to TREK's MCP server with the plugins:use scope; the tools appear as plugin_vanlife_vanlife_*.

Permissions

Only coordinates (and, for park4night, the language) leave the server — never names, notes, contacts or anything about the travellers. Host contacts stay in your TREK instance.

About park4night

park4night publishes no API: the plugin reads the endpoint its own web map uses, which may change without notice. Calls are rate-limited (20 per hour, 3 s apart). Search results are not stored; when amenities are filled, only the yes/no amenities of a place that is already in your trip are copied onto that place, with its park4night number as the source. An admin can turn park4night off in the instance settings, and the plugin then uses OpenStreetMap alone.

Limits worth knowing

Zone outlines are coarse (check a night near a border by hand). The public Overpass server allows few queries per server, so searches may answer "busy, try again in a minute". OpenStreetMap often lacks amenities, and has no reviews. Nothing here books, pays or messages anyone.

Development

npm install
npm test               # vitest, mock TREK host, no network
npm run coverage
npm run sync-manifest  # copy server/lib/tool-specs.js into trek-plugin.json
npm run validate && npm run pack

Data: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), routing by Valhalla on the FOSSGIS servers, park4night data © park4night.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.