Nerd talk – final trip stats

We are now back home, so its time for me to update the statistics that I published mid-trip.

The big picture is 149 nights away, 55 different places where we camped, and 14,000 miles driven

The following statistics are for the entire trip

We had left home on January 2^nd, and were back on May 30^th, so were away for a total of 149 nights!

We have driven 8,810 miles pulling the RV, and another 5109 miles of local driving (truck only) for a total of 13,919 miles (63% of miles driven were while pulling the RV).  For convenience sake, lets call that 9000 miles pulling, 5000 miles local for a total of 14,000 miles.

To drive such a distance, we have consumed 1275 gallons of diesel, for an overall average of 10.9 miles per gallon. (fun fact, fuel tanks display fuel dispensed to three decimals, and I record that exact number. We refueled 74 times during our trip, and the total fuel dispensed is 1275.000 gallons.  A one in a thousand probability to hit that exact .000)

That diesel cost us $5,180, at an average price of $4.063 per gallon (min paid: $3.069; max paid: a heartbreaking $8.119 – in Death Valley National Park)

The fuel cost works out to an average of $37.16 per 100 miles driven. (just a few cents off from my mid-trip statistics)

We have been gone from home for 149 days, and parked our RV in a total of 55 locations, so on average, we move every 2.7 days.  It works out that way because for stops that are destinations, we tend to stay 3 nights, which gives us 2 full days to explore.  On locations that are mainly stopovers to limit how much driving we do in a day, we tend to stay 2 nights.  We always find something interesting to see locally on the free day for these stopovers.  Our length-of-stay outliers are: 13 nights in Breckenridge, CO visiting our daughter Stephanie; 1 night in Gretna, VA the first night after we left home.

8810 miles driven with the RV, moving between 55 stops, means we drove on average 157 miles on campground change days.  As we limit ourselves to no more than 65 mph on the highway, not all driving is on highways, and we usually do a bathroom pit stop, this amounts to roughly a 3-hour drive, with a 10AM departure and a 1PM arrival (campgrounds have varying departure and check-in times, but the most prevalent is 11AM checkout, and 1PM check-in, so that works out just right.  The added benefit of that distance is that we do not have to fill-up in truck stops where fuel is typically quite a bit more expensive, and instead, we get a broader selection of fuel stations where we can go to while the RV is at the campground.

Since we were gone 149 days and had 56 driving segments (counting from the last campground to our return home) , we had 93 full days for local exploration.  And since we drove 5109 local miles, we drove on average 55 miles on exploration days. (outliers are zero local miles on our last stop, because the truck’s engine would not restart, and 350 miles while visiting Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Parks.)

We had labeled this trip as a southwestern trip, ad indeed, we spent a total of 100 days either in the Pacific or Mountain time zones

Time spent in time zone	days
Eastern	11
Central	38
Mountain	68
Pacific	32
Total	149

We have a state map on our RV, and our rule is that to add a sticker, we must sleep at least one night in a state.  This is our map as of the end of our trip

In total, we added 10 state stickers during this trip. In order of travel: Oklahoma (1 stop, 3 nights); New Mexico (6 stops, 18 nights); Arizona (8 stops, 19 nights); California (11 stops, 29 nights); Nevada (1 stop, 3 nights); Utah (5 stops, 14 nights); Colorado (4 stops, 17 nights); Kansas (2 stop, 4 nights); Missouri (1 stop, 2 nights); Illinois (1 stop, 2 nights)

The remaining stops were in 10 states we traveled to before

The theme for our trip is National Parks, and in total we visited 18!

1. 2/9 Carlsbad caverns National Park, NM https://www.nps.gov/cave/index.htm
2. 2/11 Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX https://www.nps.gov/gumo/index.htm
3. 2/16 White Sands National Park, NM https://www.nps.gov/whsa/index.htm
4. 2/23 Petrified Forest National Park, AZ https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm
5. 2/26 Grand Canyon National Park, AZ https://www.nps.gov/grca/index.htm
6. 3/7 Saguaro National Park, AZ https://www.nps.gov/sagu/index.htm
7. 3/14 Joshua Tree National Park https://www.nps.gov/jotr/index.htm
8. 3/20 Channel Islands National Park https://www.nps.gov/chis/index.htm
9. 4/2 Kings Canyon National Park https://www.nps.gov/seki/index.htm
10. 4/2 Sequoia National Park https://www.nps.gov/seki/index.htm
11. 4/9 Death Valley National Park https://www.nps.gov/deva/index.htm
12. 4/15 Zion National Park https://www.nps.gov/zion/index.htm
13. 4/17 Bryce Canyon National Park https://www.nps.gov/brca/index.htm
14. 4/21 Visit Capitol Reef National Park https://www.nps.gov/care/index.htm
15. 4/22 Arches National Park https://www.nps.gov/arch/index.htm
16. 4/24 Canyonlands National Park https://www.nps.gov/cany/index.htm
17. 4/27 Mesa Verde National Park https://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm
18. 5/28 New River Gorge National Park https://www.nps.gov/neri/index.htm

We also visited 16 museums

1. 1/20 Mobile carnival Museum, Mobile AL https://www.mobilecarnivalmuseum.com/
2. 1/26 RW Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport LA http://www.rwnaf.org/
3. 1/31 First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City OK https://famok.org/
4. 2/1 Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, Oklahoma City OK https://memorialmuseum.com/
5. 2/6 UFO museum, Roswell NM https://www.roswellufomuseum.com/
6. 2/7 Roswell museum, Roswell NM https://roswell-nm.gov/1259/Roswell-Museum
7. 2/14 El Paso Museum of archeology, El Paso TX https://epmarch.org
8. 2/14 El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso TX https://www.epma.art
9. 2/20 Museum of Indian art and culture, Santa Fe NM https://indianartsandculture.org/
10. 2/20 New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe NM https://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/
11. 2/21 Indian Pueblo Cultural center, Albuquerque NM https://indianpueblo.org/
12. 2/21 National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque NM https://www.nuclearmuseum.org/
13. 2/25 museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff AZ https://musnaz.org/
14. 3/4 Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix AZ https://dbg.org/
15. 5/18 Wizard of Oz Museum, Wamego, KS  https://ozmuseum.com/
16. 5/18 Evel Knievel Museum, Topeka, KS https://www.evelknievelmuseum.com/

We also did Eight National Monuments and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) properties, Winery visits on 6 different days (9 wineries total), one show in Vegas, and one hair-raising driving adventure to Cerro Gordo Ghost Town at 8500ft elevation near Lone Pine, CA

In between all of that Claudette did her scheduled  client calls from the RV…and we both kept up with our emails and made sure the bills are paid on time (even though pretty much everything is set-up on auto-pay).

In summary:

• Usually 2 or 3 nights per stop
• 150 miles – 3 hours driving on days we move the RV.
• We enjoyed the places we visited, and we hope that by sharing the highlights on this blogpost, you might want to add some on your own bucket list!