June 29 marked two years of living full time in our motorhome - our second nomadiversary! We are finding the nomadic lifestyle works well for us. We are constantly searching out new and interesting places to visit as we meander our way around this vast country of ours. We often pick general areas to explore (the Pacific Northwest or Maine for instance) and then gradually work on slightly more detail as to what routes to take and what to see along the way.
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| Where We Stayed and How Long |
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| Mount Rainier Early July 2017 |
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| Still Smiling at End of 2 Weeks with Habitat for Humanity in Mount Vernon Washington |
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| At Geocaching Headquarters in Seattle for Our 10,000 Find! |
Sometimes we have specific places we need to be for a given date and those requirements will give us some structure with which to fill in the intervening weeks and miles. The past year had a few of these anchor points: early July for a Habitat for Humanity build in Mount Vernon Washington, the solar eclipse on August 21 in Terrebonne Oregon, and GeoWoodstock over Memorial Day in Cincinnati Ohio. From this framework, we planned a month going around the perimeter of the Olympic Peninsula before heading south to Oregon for the eclipse. We had reserved a spot near Crater Lake to ensure we had a place over Labor Day. But after that was over, it seemed too early to head to the coast and head south. So back north we went and spent some more time in Washington state.
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| Overlooking Olympic Mountains and Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center |
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Each Day Has a Sunset, but Some Are Better than Others
Smoke from Nearby Sisters Oregon Fire |
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| Photo Montage from Solar Eclipse |
We try not to look at this lifestyle as a race to see everything. We are planning on continuing this for many years, so we didn’t need to see Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks as we came down through California this past fall. These are definitely “must see” locations, but we decided to stay along the coast as we headed south and see what it had to offer. In some future year, we will fit in the other areas in eastern California into our itinerary.
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| Crater Lake with Smoke Billowing from Wildfire |
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| Open Wide and Stick Out Your Tongue |
Our planning will include input from all sorts of places. Often it is based on researching various vacation guides in the library. Other times we use itineraries from RV caravan trips. We aren’t big on traveling with a large group on a set schedule, but the spots these groups stop at in a given area are often worth consideration. Much input comes from talking with other travelers we meet along the way. Where have they been? What did they like? What didn’t they like? Even a simple comment like a friend provided as we mentioned we wanted to do the Pacific Northwest can make a world of difference. He suggested heading south along US 101 putting the many pullouts on the right side of the rig making for much easier entrance and exit.
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| The Rugged Oregon Coast at Cape Blanco |
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| Chris Tries to Be a Tree Hugger |
Would this way of life work for everyone? No, probably not, but I suspect it would work for a larger number of you than you may think. Getting rid of 95% of our possessions was challenging both physically and emotionally. But once we started the process, it became almost therapeutic. Do I ever look back and reminisce about our house and “stuff” and miss it all? Sure, but not in a regretful way. That part of our life was great at that time in our life. This way of life, while dramatically different from our past, is much more relaxing and fulfilling.
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| Elk Pose with Sign |
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| Trees Near Pierce Point Ranch - Point Reyes National Seashore |
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| Fog Bank Below Lighthouse |
Unfortunately this lifestyle does cause us to miss our family and friends. Certain events that we would normally be able to go to become more problematic when we are thousands of miles away. But they are all just an email, phone call or text away. We have been able to make new friends along the way. It sometimes baffles us as to how we can run into some of these people again in the most random of places. I guess it just goes to show us that this is a small world we live in. Our travels have permitted us to visit with friends and family that we hadn’t seen in decades. Plus our travels back east have been arranged to allow us to see much of our family and many of our friends.
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| San Francisco Bay |
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| Hotel del Coronado |
What were some of the stats from this past years travels? We had 62 stops along the way, but 8 of those were just one night stops when we had long distances to cover in a short period of time. This puts us close to the 7 nights per stop average that we had in our first year. These stops brought us to 13 states compared to 22 states during our first year. States out west are simply larger than those in the east. We did get to visit 9 National Parks: Mt Rainier, Olympic, Crater Lake, Redwood, Joshua Tree, Saguaro, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, and Mammoth Cave. There were visits to even more National Monuments, Seashores, Historic Sites and Forests. Chiricahua and White Sands National Monuments are two of the more special ones on our list.
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| Joshua Tree National Park |
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| Mt San Jacinto Hike |
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| Rose Bowl Parade |
In terms of weather, we stayed remarkably dry during our stay out west. Even in an area known for rain, Seattle, we were there for part of their record breaking dry streak of fifty some days. This did have the downside of running into wildfires along the way. Some of them simply made for hazy conditions that didn’t impact us much. Others brought the smell of smoke and even ash falling nearby. When this happened, we needed to curtail out outdoor activities. One of the fires got too close for comfort (for us) while we were in Oceanside California and forced us to evacuate to a safer area. As we headed east this past spring, we got back to humidity that we had nearly forgotten about. I suspect we had acclimated to the dry desert conditions so coming back to hot and humid was a tough change.
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| Polo Match Up Close and Personal |
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| Newmar Gathering in the Desert - Quartzsite Arizona |
We did quite well with our campground costs. A couple month long stops and staying at numerous Elks Lodges brought our average daily rate to just over $23. Last year our daily rate was about four dollars higher. We didn’t approach our camping choices with reducing costs but it just happened. We will likely do much worse next year while we are on the east coast where camping seems to be more costly.
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| Another Special Sunset - Quartzsite Arizona |
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| Donkeys Overrun Downtown Oatman Arizona |
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| Fireworks Display in Lake Havasu City Arizona |
We spent just over $2500 in diesel for the motorhome and put on just under 7000 miles. That’s about 2000 miles less than last year but only $200 less giving us to 36 cents per mile average, 6 cents more than our first year. An outcome of higher fuel prices especially while in California. We added just over 13,000 miles on the Jeep spending just under $1600. Nearly identical gas cost compared to last year yet about 4000 fewer miles. Given the consistency of our fuel costs year to year, one may think we have a budget and have adjusted our travels accordingly. In all honesty, we don’t have a budget setup for fuel, the numbers just happened this way.
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| Bench Along Hotshot Memorial Hike |
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| Challenging Hike at Picacho Peak |
In terms of travel pace, we have done better at slowing it down a bit. On the days we traveled, we averaged 112 miles. On a miles per day basis over the full year, we dropped from 25 miles per day last year to 19 miles per day this year. Having our two, month long stops this past year definitely helped with this statistic.
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| Lorikeet Feeding |
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| Kitt Peak National Observatory |
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| Seven Falls in Sabino Canyon |
We are still finding living in such a small space comfortable. Our 38 foot motorhome seems to be working well in terms of fitting into smaller state park campground sites that a 42 footer just wouldn’t squeeze in. We have needed to exclude certain campgrounds that may have been nice to stay at but even our rig wouldn’t fit. We did get a chance to look at the Newmar New Aire motorhome. It is a new model from Newmar that comes in close to 34 feet in length. It is a nice rig but interior cabinet space was quite tight. Downsizing would require a fair number of our possessions to either be left behind or replaced with smaller versions. It wasn’t something we were willing to deal with, at least right now.
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| Balanced Rock Chiricahua National Monument |
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| White Sands Missile Museum |
In terms of traveling by serendipity, we did reasonably well. We reserved campgrounds when we needed to be somewhere at a specific time as well as during the major summer holidays of Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day. In some of the more touristy areas, we also planned ahead and had a spot booked. But there were many places that we just showed up at or called ahead as we were getting close. Sad to say that we ended this second year doing less “winging it”. In fact, from May of this year to April of next year we have probably 75% of the time reserved. I guess that is just a function of being back east. It is hard to wing it in Florida during the winter high season which is where we plan to be this coming winter.
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| Trinity Site - Atomic Bomb Testing Spot |
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| Hiking White Sands National Monument |
Geocaching continues to be a big part of our life. We have continued our cache a day streak (much to Chris’ chagrin) and are nearly at two years. We found just under 1800 caches in our second year of full timing. Our stop near Seattle was timed so we could reach our 10,000 find milestone at geocaching headquarters. We even got some friends and family to join in on our fun as we toured around. We have found some remarkable geocaches and done plenty of lame ones in the process. Our stop in Cincinnati got us to a “Giga” event. Somewhere on the order of 7000 avid geocachers joined us for the celebration at Coney Island.
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| The Aliens Have Landed - Roswell New Mexico |
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| Reflecting Pool in Carlsbad Caverns National Park |
The last few weeks spent visiting family and friends was really special. A visit with our former neighbors brought us back to the old homestead. Other than walking up the driveway to visit our beloved dog Shelby’s grave, we didn’t continue up the driveway beyond the last bend to see the house. Sometimes it’s just better to leave some things to your memories. And with that said, we have many adventures planned for year three as we head east and north to Maine and then to Florida. We hope the experiences we have will form many lasting memories.
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| Corvette Museum Bowling Green Kentucky |
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| Wrapping Up with Another Sunset |
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