One Year on the Road!

Map of our first year on the road. Click this link to open the map

It's hard to believe it's been a full year since we pulled out of our driveway for the last time. We have managed to find some fun and interesting things to see and do along the way. We didn't have any firm goals for the first year so it would be tough to do a performance appraisal for the year. When I was still working, I never really enjoyed having to put together my performance commitments for the upcoming year. Especially when the goals needed to be quantifiable. So it's not too surprising we didn't make anything that concrete for this stage of our life. 

The only thing we hoped to do was to slow down the pace and enjoy what an area has to offer. We might still be underperforming in that regard. I think we told people that we hoped to stay in places for a month at a time instead of days at a time. We did manage to average about 7 nights per stop once you eliminate the dozen or so one night stops we had over the course of the year. A one night stop is simply an indication that the distance between where we are and where we want to be next is too great for us to drive it in one day.

We did manage to camp in 22 states which sort of surprised us. Chris saw my tally as I was putting together info for this blog post and she was skeptical I had the right count. I guess that is why we keep a spreadsheet of all our travels and stops. It helps to keep us honest. We also visited 5 National Parks (Big Bend, Saguaro, Zion, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef) as well as 21 National Monuments, Historic Parks, etc. Chris has done a pretty good job of stamping her National Park Passport of the places we have visited.

Where We've Stayed and How Long

 Many people that live this lifestyle talk about moving around the country trying to maintain some magic temperature - maybe 70 degrees. Well if that was our goal, we were not very successful in achieving it. We did not keep track of that info (although I suppose I could go back and figure that out), but suffice it to say we had dozens of days in the mid to upper 90's and several nights in the mid 20's. We even had snow twice. Once while camping in Davis Mountain State Park in west Texas and again while driving at 9000 feet near Bryce Utah. Experiencing unintended snowfall definitely drops our performance rating in the weather category. 

 In terms of cost, I think we have done reasonably well. Our average camping cost per night was about $27. Our property and school taxes on our old place was roughly $28 a day and we had joked that we could probably camp for about that price. Turns out we were darn close. The most expensive place was just outside of Washington DC at $61 a night. Out cheapest was boondocking in Quartzsite for free although once you factor in the fuel for the generator, it was closer to $3.50 a day. When given the option in an area, we typically will pick a less expensive campground because we generally don't use the amenities that higher priced ones offer. So if your ideal campground is the resort style with pools, spas, exercise room, shuffleboard courts and other things like that, we probably aren't the ones to ask for advice. 

 Fuel costs for the motorhome were just about $2700 for the year. Of course that is directly proportional to the miles driven. We drove just about 9000 miles this year which works out to about 30 cents a mile. Some people might see that cost per mile and flinch. I like to look at it this way. My home will cruise down the road at 65 miles per hour quite nicely, how far can you drive your home!

One other way I have started to "measure" the pace of our travels is to calculate miles traveled per day. There are two ways I look at this. One is to find out how many miles we drive on the days we drive the motorhome. We know of other RVers that talk about the "330 rule" - no more that 330 miles per day or off the road by 3:30 PM, whichever comes first. For planning purposes, we opt for a much lower upper limit. We use 200 miles as our max limit for a travel day. Our longest travel day was 250 miles which is a completely manageable distance for me to drive depending on road, traffic and weather conditions. 

 The other way I have started to look use to understand our "pace" is miles per day whether we travel or not. Calculating it this way factors in both the distance traveled on travel days as well as the length of stay at a place without traveling. Our number works out to be about 25 miles per day. Having never looked at the data this way before, I went back to our earlier years starting with our travel trailer we had in 2010. In those six prior years, generally we were traveling 50 to 80 miles per night camped. This much higher number is simply a fact that we would do long weekend trips, driving 100 to 200 miles to a campground but only staying a few nights before putting on the same distance back home. We are now at a value about one half to one third as much and the sense we get is we are at a much more leisurely pace. 

One last category to mention is how far we have driven the Jeep in our first full year. We came close to 17,000 miles and spent about $1600 in gas. While we were in Arizona for the winter, the Jeep miles were down from average simply because we would move our home to many locations in the state so we never really needed to drive to some distant place. We would just move our home to a closer spot if there was an area we wanted to explore. In the last 3 months coming to the Pacific Northwest, we have done a bit more driving with the Jeep. Some of that was that we were camped well outside of both Zion and Capitol Reef National Parks, so there were longer drives just to get to the spots we wanted to see. 

So what have we learned in this first year on the road? We are able to live comfortably with significantly much less stuff than we used to have in our sticks and bricks home. We were in a 2200 square foot home on 50 acres in western New York and had lived in the general area for over 30 years. We had accumulated a lot of stuff and I can tell you it was stuff we "needed" not just "wanted". It was a huge adjustment to sell off the bulk of our possessions. While we were in the process of downsizing, there were some things we just had to keep. I suspect it was more of a psychological thing. Had we started to downsize earlier, we would have been able to do it at a much more leisurely pace. I wouldn't have felt that I was getting rid of too much too fast and likely would have been able to pare things down more. 

I suppose it could also be a matter of "you don't know, what you don't know." We were heading into the unknown and maybe it was a little bit scary. By keeping some of our prized things, we could have something familiar with us. Well, whatever the reason, we have determined we have brought along much more than we really needed. And now that a full year has passed, it won't be as big of deal to do a little bit of additional downsizing. We had consciously decided to trade in stuff for experiences, maybe if we lose some more stuff, there will be room for more experiences. 

We know of people that full time in rigs smaller than ours, some significantly smaller. But I would suspect that the majority of people are in rigs bigger than ours. Our rig is 38 foot long and it was extremely tough to find a used rig this "short". A 40, 42 or 45 foot used rig would have been significantly easier to come by. We probably would have looked for a shorter rig than we got but the manufacturers don't make them that short in the higher end diesel pushers. Well apparently Newmar has been listening to us and many others because they have just announced a new model that has many of the chassis features and amenities we were wanting but in a 34 foot length. I wouldn't say we are sold on them yet and probably won't be in the market for a new rig, but it is definitely something we will be keeping an eye on and possibly get to see in person later this year when they start making it to dealers.

The other thing we are learning is that it is difficult to travel completely by serendipity. I suppose if we had a magic pass that would allow us to pull into a campground unannounced and have a spot large enough for our rig and the ability to stay there as long (or short) as we desired, we would be able to travel much more freely. But with the volume of people out camping, it can be tough to find a place to stay without some planning. This is definitely true if there is a specific location you want to be close to or if it is a holiday weekend. Some of the state parks in Arizona in the winter required us to reserve a couple months in advance. Now that's not to say we couldn't  find spots to stay that are off the beaten path, but if you want to do Yellowstone or Zion or Yosemite, you should really plan ahead.

Geocaching is a big part of our current lifestyle. When we started our full time travels, we found that we were caching every day. During an initial visit with family in Cincinnati, we skipped caching one day but shortly after that we found we were finding at least one cache per day. Previously we had a caching streak of 124 days, but now it was a bit easier to find a cache a day. Typically we were in a new area with lots of caches and the weather was typically nice. Admittedly there were times where we didn't feel like continuing our caching streak. Or when we were in very remote areas with few caches and we needed to ration our finding rate in order to keep it going. But we kept it going and as of our anniversary date, we have our streak at 358 straight days. 

I thought it would be interesting to try to show our first year of travels in the form of a geocaching "movie" of sorts. Every half second, the image changes to include the found geocaches for that day. In the upper left corner, the date is displayed. We have found 1850 caches in our year on the road. Although the scale of the map doesn't do a good job of showing them all. I'm still trying to figure out how to zoom in on the map on Google Earth and then smoothly pan as we travel around the country. For now this is my best option.

So in conclusion. Do we regret selling all our house and all our stuff and hitting the road? Not at all. How much longer do we think we will do this? We don't really see an end date at this point. As long as our health holds out and we are enjoying ourselves, we don't see any reason to come off the road. Plus we haven't found the perfect place to settle down. We really enjoyed the Tucson area this winter, but they have been experiencing over 110 degree heat recently. Definitely not something we would want to deal with. That might be the only downside of exploring new areas. We will often be visiting during the best weather months. If we ever feel the desire to plant our feet, we will need to do a bit more thorough "testing" of the area during other seasons.