Two Months on the Road

Camping stops during first two months click this link to open the map

August 29 was the completion of our first 2 months on the road. And since I still think like an engineer, I guess I will start the summary with a list of the facts. Plus we have had several friends and strangers ask us these types of questions.

• We have been in the rig 62 nights.
• We have stayed at 7 campgrounds for multiple nights and had 5 overnight stays at places like Walmart and Cabela's as we travel longer distances between destinations.
• We have done 1650 miles with the motorhome.
• The diesel fuel motor home is costing us $0.26 per mile.
• We are averaging $27 per day in camping fees.
• On the days we drive the motor home, we have averaged 138 miles per day.
• We have put just about 3000 miles on the Jeep doing all our sightseeing trips.

There really weren't any surprises in the numbers. Having traveled a lot over the past 6 years, this is about what we were typically doing with the possible exception of our length of time we stay at one campground is a bit longer than we used to do. When we started out on this adventure, one of our goals was to slow down and stick in a place longer than just a couple days or so. We actually hope to stay put for even longer than this in the future, but we have a fixed end date for this first part of our travels so this schedule and pace is just how it works out.

It seems like we are in tourist mode 85% of the time and normal life mode the remaining 15%  That might be the one thing that seems a bit skewed. Not that it takes more than 15% to handle the mundane life activities, but it seems like trying to be in tourist mode for that long gets tiring. I used to joke when I was still working, that I needed to go back to work after a long vacation in order to rest up! These first two months have been very fun but admittedly tiring at times.

What have we learned that we didn't know before. For one thing, we are easily able to stay at campgrounds without full hookups for 10 days without any holding (fresh, black or grey) tank problems. Admittedly we have been at some places with reasonably nice facilities so we don't mind showering there especially mid-week when it isn't crowded. And Chris has not exclusively done laundry in the rig but went to laundromats occasionally. 

We miss having off the air television choices but probably not enough to go with some sort of satellite receiver (there's already a dish on the roof). While in the Upper Peninsula there were quite many spots where we had no choices, or the channel we got would come and go randomly. We even discovered the LED bulbs we put in much of the coach's interior lights can interfere with TV reception in low signal areas. Normally I don't care which network we get, as long as we can get the evening news at times. But we missed all the Olympics because we didn't get NBC where we were those weeks. Pretty sure this is the first time I saw no Olympic events broadcast.

Worse than not having television, we went 9 nights at a campground without any Verizon signal. Not positive if we had some sort of booster we would have had better luck or not. Maybe AT&T would have been better? But Chris hasn't added this to her iPad yet but the thinking is to go that route to give us a backup plan if we hit areas where one is better than the other.

For the most part, we have started to get used to where things are stored and only occasionally search for things that might be hidden in some box or container stashed away in some seldom accessed cabinet. I finally found the HDMI cable I was sure I had brought before going and buying a new one. I guess that is one nice thing about living in a few hundred square feet versus 2800 square feet - there are not nearly as many hiding spots!

There haven't been too many things we feel we are lacking with the obvious exception of our dog Shelby. I cannot say that we really miss owning the house or all our stuff. In fact I suspect that there will be some things that we brought along that we will agree we really don't need and can part with at some future date.

There may still be a bit of apprehension about wandering aimlessly. After the wedding in Cincinnati, we are thinking of heading towards Washington DC. I have never been there other than to drive by on some business trip and Chris was there years ago with her mom on a vacation for a week. After that there is no plan except to head towards Florida to deal with the paperwork required to become residents there.

Summary: We are enjoying this phase and have no regrets about going thru the downsizing to get here.