Early on in the planning for the year, we had decided to make the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta a destination. Being in early October, that would give us six months to spend on a leisurely route. We hadn’t spent much time in Dakotas or the Rockies so we mapped out a large loop that would a take us up that way hitting many of the beautiful National Parks along the way. In fact, we should just call 2019 our year of the National Park. We stayed in or near nine of them during the year: Badlands, Teddy Roosevelt, Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Arches, Canyonlands, Mesa Verde, and Petrified Forest. Surely you’ve heard of a few of those! There were also numerous other state parks or National Monuments interspersed to fill in some gaps.
The map above shows the 48 stops we made during the course of the year. Clicking on the link just below the map will open a Google Map that may be zoomed in to permit better viewing of the individual stops. Plus clicking on any pin will pop up a small window with a link to the blog post that goes along with that stop. Having stayed at nearly 200 places in the past 3.5 years, I was finding it difficult to direct someone to a particular blog post since it would require knowing which year we stayed at the location in question. So I have developed a “landing page” for the blog which will always be the first page viewed when heading to outofourrut.blogspot.com. At the bottom of this page is a map with all our stops since going full time. It too is a Google Map that has pins for each stop with links to the appropriate blog post.
Two other maps that I like to include in our review are “heat maps” that shade in each state we have camped in. The shading varies between light pink to dark red to indicate how long we stayed in each state as well as a key below the map with the details. We stayed in 20 states in 2019 and are now up to 41 states in our full time travels.
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| Our 2019 Camping Map |
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| Our 3.5 Year Camping Map |
Here’s a condensed table with our statistics for each of the three calendar years as well as the second half of 2016 having gone full time on June 29 of that year. We have successfully slowed down the pace with only 48 stops but with 15 of those being one night stays just to get us from one planned destination to another. This brought our average nights per stop up to 10.6 nights.
In terms of miles driven with the motorhome, we seem to have settled into a rather consistent pattern. Other than our first 6 months in 2016 where we seemed to be on some sort of mission to keep moving and were on a 12K mile per year pace, we now seem to be in a groove keeping our mileage right around 6500 per year. Given the spread in mileage over the three full years is only about 200 miles, it almost seems too consistent. I suppose it may simply be a result of us finding a pace that works for us and our mileage per year is a reflection of that pace. We aren’t quite as consistent with the miles we put on the Jeep. We came in at just about 14K miles, up about 1800 over last year but nearly the same as 2017.
Camping costs have kept going up and took a rather large jump this year. Our average cost per night went up over $4 compared to last year. I have broken the nights down into four categories: boondocking (camping without services), state parks, private campgrounds and Elks Lodges. We stayed at Elks Lodges 14 nights more often than last year but this was only reached by staying at 4 different lodges for a total of 43 nights in a row from late October to early December - another record for us. The cost per night at Elks was in line with previous years.
State parks and private campground were $3 more per night than last year. I suspect that a lot of this increase was simply based on the locations we were going to this year. We hit many of the very touristy areas and prices are simply higher where the demand is greater. The one line item that really caught my attention was the boondocking costs. At over $26 per night, I initially assumed I had made a mistake in my spreadsheet because typically we think of boondocking as free camping. I’m in the habit of including the fuel costs to run the generator as part of the boondocking costs but even if I ran the generator 24 hours a day, I wouldn’t use enough fuel to account for the high price.
It didn’t take long to discover the reason. We had boondocked 10 nights in Custer SD at a federal campground that ended up being nearly $31 per night. Even more expensive was our eleven night stay boondocking at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta averaging nearly $45 per night. So while it’s possible to boondock for free or nearly free, you can’t plan on doing that everywhere. The good thing was Custer and Albuquerque were two of our favorite stops of the year.
Speaking of our favorite stops, we again have gone over our notes, photos and recollections to come up with our top ten destinations for this year. This is not a statement of which RV park we liked but rather the town or area we stayed at. Chris and I agreed on most of them but our lists were not identical. A simple game of “rock, paper, scissors” settled our differences and here is our list in chronological order since we don’t have the wherewithal to rank them! For each stop, I picked a photo from that area and also include the link to the blog post for that stop. A few of our favorite stops have more than one post so the link takes you to the first one.
- Hudson, Florida: Just a little north of Tampa, there are lots of things to see and do in the area. We went to Homosassa State Park a couple times to enjoy all the animals they have. There were several water conservation preserves in the area as well and I found Connor Preserve to be a great place to try a new activity - swamp biking. We camped just a few miles from my sister’s home so it was convenient to come over for dinner or movies or football and basketball games on TV. We even managed to get some work done on the rig and reupholstered our chairs and window treatments.
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| Bathing Pelican at Homosassa SP |
- Oak Mountain State Park - Birmingham, Alabama: We had stayed here once before we went full time and loved the place. We forced our route north to have this stop along the way. We could only squeeze in 5 nights since we weren’t planning far enough ahead. We found several other things to see and do in the Birmingham area, but the real draw for us is the park itself. The campground is nice. The park is nearly 10,000 acres with over 50 miles of multi use trail and over 300 geocaches. It is hilly terrain and the woods reminds us of those we had in western New York. Even with our weeklong stay the first time, there are still plenty of caches we haven’t found and trail we haven’t hiked. I’m sure we’ll be back.
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| Spring Flower |
Custer State Park - Custer South, Dakota: This place is incredible and could easily be a National Park. We camped for 10 nights in a federal forest campground on the border of the park so we had easy access to the park but close enough to the town of Custer for supplies if needed. We got to experience a bison jam while driving the roads of the park which brings the big beasts closer to the car than we really wanted. The hike to Black Elk Peak was one of our favorites we’ve tackled. Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Monument are both nearby and probably should be visited but we found them to be a little underwhelming and even though we will definitely be back to Custer, we will likely skip those two and do more hiking instead.
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| Young Bison with Strange Tastes |
- Theodore Roosevelt National Park - Medora, North Dakota: This park is a bit out of the way but by being so has the advantage of being less crowded than some of others. We stayed for 5 nights in a US Forest service campground just west of the park. There were some good hikes in TRNP. One hike happened to go right through a large herd of bison and we needed to veer off course quite a bit to maintain a safe distance. Experiences like that are always fun “after” you survive them without harm. Another hike took us to a remote petrified forest.
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| Large Petrified Tree Stump |
- Glacier National Park - Babb, Montana: Hands down, Glacier was my favorite stop of the year and is my favorite stop of all time. Chis will argue the point that while the hiking is excellent, she was constantly fearful of coming upon a black bear or grizzly. And her fears would be well founded, bears are abundant there. At no time did we need to use our bear spray but we never did a hike without it. We did have the good fortune of seeing lots of wildlife on our many hikes in the park: grizzlies, black bear, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and even a bobcat. We spent 18 nights on the east side of the park in Babb and 11 nights just outside the west end of the park in Kalispell. For hikers, it's worth staying on the more remote east side of the park for easier access to many of the better hiking trail. While the hiking brought us to some rather amazing views, simply driving the Going-to-the-Sun Road through the park will likely rate as one of the most scenic drives we have ever done.
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| Mountain Goat Strikes a Pose |
- Yellowstone National Park - Northwestern Wyoming: Definitely a beautiful park with such a wide variety of things to see. We spent 8 nights camped in West Yellowstone and 13 nights in Gardiner. The thermal features like Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic Spring we so interesting but are also annoyingly crowded. We did a few decent hikes that got us away from the crowds to some degree but even parking at most trailheads was an issue. Yellowstone is a must do when your in this part of the country but in hindsight, I would have moved a week or so from Yellowstone to Glacier.
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| Grand Prismatic Spring |
- Grand Teton National Park - Jackson, Wyoming: Just south of Yellowstone, we found this park much more our style of park. It wasn’t quite as crowded at Yellowstone but still very busy. We found the hiking here to be much more enjoyable with some excellent scenery. We camped inside the park at Gros Ventre campground which made getting to the trailheads fairly easy. An added benefit during our stay were the several bull moose that liked to wander thru camp in the morning. One was close enough to our rig that Chris could have opened the window and scratched its antlers.
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| Three Bull Moose Check Out the Dutch Star |
- Moab, Utah: Both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks are close to Moab and were a blast to explore. We spent 12 nights in Moab and 7 nights in nearby Dead Horse Point State Park. The later is a destination all its own that is similar to Canyonlands but on a smaller scale. The actual sandstone arches within Arches NP are we fun to see and check out. The easiest ones to get to are generally crowded but if you’re up for some longer hikes, there are numerous other ones that can be seen with a much smaller crowd. We did a scary drive down into the canyon at Canyonlands that was beautiful although Chris only discovered that fact after we completed the drive down the switchbacks and opened her eyes!
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| Landscape Arch at Arches NP |
- Balloon Fiesta - Albuquerque, New Mexico: Early October each year many hundreds of balloonists converge in Albuquerque for a nine day extravaganza. Unfortunately many tens of thousands of spectators also show up but don’t let the crowds keep you away. This is a must for everyone’s bucket list. We did the event as part of a group simply because it’s the only way to do it without making reservations a year in advance. The main event each day is the morning launch and if you want to experience it all, plan on getting up early. The dawn patrol takes off at 6AM! Of course you’ll get back to your rig by mid morning and can take a nap until the late afternoon activities start. It’s hard to do the event justice in paragraph and a single photo. Read my post to get a better flavor with lots of pictures.
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| Balloon Launches at Dawn Patrol |
- Prescott, Arizona: This might be the most surprising place to make our list. We had made a day trip to Prescott back in February of 2018 and found it to a nice town with what looked like tons of good hiking. Our plan was to stay 10 nights but found it to be even better than we were anticipating so we stayed an additional 7 nights. The hike around Watson Lake was one of our favorites from a pure beauty standpoint. The most moving hike we have ever done is in the nearby town of Yarnell. It is the Hotshots Memorial State Park hike dedicated to the 19 firefighters killed during a fire in 2013. We had done this hike back in 2018 so we didn’t head back this trip but if you are in this area, it should be considered a must do hike. Besides all the good hiking, we enjoyed the wide variety of excellent geocaches hidden in the area.
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| Watson Lake |
I would be remiss to not mention a few other highlights from 2019. In April, we were part of Habitat for Humanity's 30th Anniversary build and rally in North Fort Myers Florida. It was fun meeting so many other RV Care-A-Vanners and enjoyed the week of building and socializing. We had a motorhome breakdown this year that required a tow into a service center. Fortunately we managed to get to a safe spot off the road and got towed the next day the 40 miles into Missoula Montana. It was nerve racking to drive up onto the flatbed trailer. And a couple days later, we were back on the road again. Even with this minor bump in the road, 2019 was quite the memorable year. And lastly, we had been maintaining a geocache find every day streak since the early days of our full time adventure. I intended to end the streak at 1000 days in a row but couldn't. When 1234 days came around, I figured that would be a good point to stop but didn't. Finally after 1248 days, we stopped our streak just for a day to get the monkey off our backs. Maybe it's time to start a new streak?
What's on tap for 2020? We haven't done much in terms of planning yet, but there are several geocaching events in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia this summer that might be enough to push us in that direction. I guess we need to put some thought into that question.
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