This was one blog post I wasn’t positive I wanted to spend the time writing. 2020 started out looking to be quite the memorable year. With plans in place to possibly make it our best in the last four and a half years of full time travels. After spending the winter in the desert southwest, we would head north through parts of California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington we haven’t explored yet. Then cross the border to spend the summer in the Canadian Rockies - Banff, Jasper, and the Calgary Stampede. Then west to British Columbia for a few big geocaching events in the Pacific Northwest. Then work our way south as the weather changed and spend the winter in the same area we started the year. Many reservations had been made for some of the locations we knew would be busy and we were really looking forward to what we had planned.
Then just like everyone else in the world, our plans needed to change. Chris recognized this fact sooner than I did. I was still the optimist or in denial, not wanting all our work to go for naught. As full time RVers, we have lots of information sources regarding camping, travel and this lifestyle. When we started to see how early closures and restrictions were impacting other travelers, we realized not only our travel plans for Canada had been dashed, but our type of travel was quickly changing. States were closing campgrounds or limiting the occupancy rate. Even though living in an RV seems to be the ideal form of social isolation, we felt vulnerable to the whims of state or local authorities as Covid conditions changed. At the time, we were in Yuma Arizona. A pleasant climate for during the winter, but not the place to stay much past April. We moved up in elevation for two months before even Camp Verde started to get too hot.
By summer, the campground closure situation had stabilized but now droves of people were realizing staying in an RV allowed for better isolation - your own bathroom, kitchen and bed - while still being able to get out in the relative isolation of nature. RV sales went thru the roof and campgrounds were filling up even more than normal. With things still not looking good for travel at least in the manner we prefer, we found an private ownership resort near Show Low Arizona and rented a lot for 4 months starting on Memorial Day. This kept us in a place with a relatively low turnover of campers but got us to a higher elevation and hopefully a more tolerable temperature range. Some people do stay year round in this resort but we didn’t want cold weather. So we weighed the option of going to southern Arizona for the winter versus our other options and decided to head east for a prolonged stay in Florida.
We took 5 weeks to head east following a non conventional route thru Kansas. We got in some more typical travel with some of the summer travelers off the road and eventually settled into our spot in Brooksville Florida for the start of a 5 month stay. So 2020 was a memorable year for us but just like you, for all the wrong reasons. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some highlights worth sharing.
This map shows the 30 stops we made over the course of 2020. Clicking the link below the map will open the map within Google Maps and permit zooming and panning to see the stops more easily. Plus by clicking on any of the pins at each stop, a pop up will show a link to the blog post from that stay.
Two other maps I create are “heat maps” that shade in the various states we have camped in. The shade of red from light pink to bright red indicates how long we stayed in each state. We only stayed in 10 states this past year. However we did add two states we hadn’t camped in during our first 3.5 years of full timing - Kansas and Mississippi. The second map shows the full four and a half years of full time travels. We are now up to 43 states. Arizona and Florida by far have the most number of stops simply because we seem to settle in these spots for the winter months. And Arizona got a big boost by staying there a total of 256 nights this year.
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| Our 2020 Camping Map |
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| Our 4.5 Years Camping Map |
As former engineers, we tend to be into keeping track of the various numbers associated with our travels. Here’s a condensed table of the stats for the last 4.5 years. When we started our full time journeys, we anticipated slower travel pace than we actually ended up doing the first few years. Well, 2020 certainly slowed our pace down dramatically but we can definitely say we would prefer to go back to the carefree days of the past.
Camping costs saw a dramatic drop in 2020 as well. At just under $23 per night, it is about 19% lower than the previous years. The reason for the drop is easy to explain. With slower travel and longer stays, we get the much cheaper monthly rates that many private campgrounds offer. We had a month at $13.59 per night, two months at $18.41 per night and four months at $23.22 per night. The breakdown between boondocking, state parks, private parks and Elks Lodges was heavily skewed this year - spending 80% of our time in private campgrounds.
I doubt there would be many, if any, RVers touting how great their travels were this past year. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been to some wonderful places and seen some really great sights along the way. In the past, we would have used our year end review to go over our top ten destinations for the year. Usually we had more than ten places worthy of our list and would need to narrow it down. This year we have the opposite problem only coming up with 8 locations. For each stop that made the cut, I’ve included a brief description, a link to the specific blog post for that stop and a favorite photo. With that said, here are our top stops of 2020:
- Cave Creek Arizona - Just North of Phoenix, Cave Creek Regional Park is a nice place to call home for awhile to explore the area. Like the other regional parks in the Phoenix area, there is some excellent hiking and much of it can be done right from our campsite. Just to the south of the campground was the Apache Wash Trailhead. There was some great mountain biking with miles of trails. If they had full hook up campsites, this would be a great spot to spend more than a few days.
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| Cave Creek Hike |
- Patagonia Lake State Park Arizona - South of Tucson and only 10 miles north of the Mexico border, this spot took us by surprise. It is a very desolate location but pretty with more mountainous terrain than we were expecting. The lake is rather large at least by Arizona standards and is a birder’s paradise. Not a ton of hiking trails but what is there was nice. Two nearby sites worth a visit are Tumacacori National Historical Park and Empire Ranch.
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| Arched Bridge over Patagonia Lake |
- Bisbee Arizona - This old mining town is one of those picture perfect quaint towns. The town is nestled into the side of the surrounding hills making walking around town challenging at times. There are hikes in the hills that give a nice view of the town below. Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area is a must do stop even if you aren’t big into birding. Thousands of sandhill cranes come thru the area and create quite the spectacle during the winter months. A visit to Fort Huachuca was not originally on our radar, but after passing the background check, we were able to visit the base and some of the fascinating museums.
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| Overlooking Bisbee on Hike |
- Camp Verde Arizona - Our first stop after Covid lockdowns went into place. There are lots of things to see and do in the immediate area around Camp Verde and we found some good hiking nearby. A bunch of places were closed but in normal times, there should be ample things to keep the outdoor enthusiast happy. It also makes for a relatively good home base to check out Sedona, Cottonwood, Jerome and even Prescott Valley. Being there for 2 months, we tended to branch out farther than we typically would. Two weeks might be about the proper duration to get most of the sights in.
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| Beautiful View Along Bell Trail Hike |
- Show Low Arizona - This was our 4 month stop trying to keep out of harms way while staying a bit cooler at higher elevation than down in the valley near Phoenix. We found enough to do in the area to keep us from going stir crazy. In normal times, I would recommend staying further south in the Pinetop-Lakeside area to be closer to the outdoor recreation areas. This is an area known as the White Mountains and we found some excellent hiking with some of the trails near Greer over 9000 feet in elevation. As it was, our spot at Juniper Ridge Resort allowed us to get caught up on some upgrades to the rig and gave me access to a nice woodworking shop.
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| View Along Trail Near Mt Baldy |
- Great Sand Dunes National Park Colorado - It’s an out of the way location with little else nearby. These facts probably keep many people from visiting, but if you’re within a hundred miles or so, I would suggest you budget a few days to check out this unique place. Sand hiking on dunes is dramatically more difficult than walking a sand beach for two reasons. The park is at about 8000 feet elevation and all the sand is loose going up the dunes. We didn’t make it to the very top as the novelty wore our about a third of the way up.
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| Great Sand Dunes NP |
- Colorado Springs - We had only budgeted 5 nights but would have liked to stay several weeks. We managed to get in some excellent hikes in the nearby mountains. We also spent a day each at Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak. I’m sure there are other touristy things in the area that will be better accomplished after Covid is gone. I suspect much of Colorado will become a several month stay in the future.
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| Pikes Peak on a Fall Day |
- Petit Jean State Park Arkansas - This Park is about 70 miles northwest of Little Rock so I suppose technically it could be done as a day trip from there. But there is so much to see and some great hiking all within the park. We spent 4 nights there and just barely saw and did it all. The park includes some great CCC buildings and other structures. If possible plan your visit to approach from the east side to minimize the steep grade and hairpin turns.
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| CCC Shelter in Petit Jean SP |
With 2020 in the rear view mirror, what are our plans for 2021? Since it it likely that Covid restrictions will continue well into the new year, we plan to stay put in Brooksville Florida thru the end of March. Then we’ll head north with a motorhome service stop in Gaffney South Carolina before continuing to Columbus Ohio for a wedding. We also bit the bullet and ordered all new furniture for the rig. Many manufacturers used an upholstery fabric that wasn’t up to the task. Our captain’s chairs have been peeling for almost 2 years but we managed to find some fitted slip covers that have done their job. But now that the other furniture has started to peel as well, we felt it was time to remedy the situation. We looked into re-upholstery options but weren’t finding a business we felt comfortable with. So we ordered new furniture and should be available in spring. Hopefully? Since the production and shipping window was highly variable, we decided to have it delivered to the business we bought from in Elkhart Indiana so we know that is part of our 2021 too. Beyond that, who knows?
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