Here are a bunch of statistics related to our trip. I will do yet one more post soon to address trip highights.
Time away. We were literally away the whole summer, as we left on June 22 (day 1 of summer) and returned on October 10th (fall season) for a total of 108 days.
One objective we accomplished is to complete our map of lower 48 states, by adding 11 states where we hadn’t been before with this RV for 1 or more nighs.
Geographically, we spent our time between time zones as follows:
Eastern: 13; Central: 26; Mountain: 44; Pacific: 25
Our trip expense profile was 37% for fuel, and 63% for campground.
Because this involved summer travel, we had booked all our campgrounds prior to our departure. We stayed at 51 campgrounds (50 of which were different – our first and 51st were the same campground in WV)
Our median stay at the same place is 2 nights, with the minimum being 1 (many “waypoint” campgrounds to limit distance driven per day) and the maximum 5 when we visited Yellowstone National Park. Our median stay was 2 nights per campground, giving us one no-RV-towing / prepare-the-RV-to-travel clear day to visit
Our theme was National Parks, and so we visited 14 of them, plus an additional 16 National Monuments. (We got an excellent return on my lifetime sevior pass which Claudette had purchased for me back when I turned 63). On top of that, we visited another 28 places (such as State Parks) for a total of 82 places visited. To see that much in just 108 days, one can understand why some memories from recent travel feel like souvenirs from a long time ago. That said, we always enjoyed the moment and never felt overloaded.
We of course had to eat during our travels, and generally speaking, we prefer home cooked meals rather than restaurants. On travel days, Claudette prepared a lunch we could eat either in the truck while driving or at a picnic table at a roadside rest area. We still wanted to get a feel for local cuisine, and we ate out 12 times (5 lunches, 7 dinners) and went out for drinks (cider, beer, wine) 12 times.
We did a lot of driving… a total of 13,133 miles. 66% of that was towing the RV between campgrounds, and 33% was local truck-only driving to explore and visit the places we had planned to go to and more.
We will be happy to drive our Camry again and get 45 mpg. During our trip, we achieved 9.9 miles/gallon towing and 15.7 mpg driving locally (with most fill-ups being 11.3 mpg “mixed” driving). This trip, 100% of our fueling stops were after we had unhitched, which gives us more flexibility to fill-up at stations that would be inaccessible while towing. The price difference between truck stops and regular stations was sometimes stunning. For our fill-ups, pricing varied from $3.19 (Bismark, ND) to $4.81 (Port Angeles, WA)