2023 Year End Review

It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone. At the close of 2023, we have been on the road full time for seven and a half years. Having spent the prior year heading from east to west, we ended up using this year to return back east. The first three months of 2023 were spent in the desert southwest of Arizona with the bulk of that time in one of our favorite winter destinations - Tucson. During the winter months, we put together our plans for the upcoming year with western New York as our goal for the summer season. We reserved a seasonal site in the Finger Lakes town of Waterloo that would be available between May 1 thru November 1. Having lived 32 years in the Rochester New York area, we knew not to get there too early in the spring or stay too late in the fall - it can get cold or even snow. We ended up spending almost five and a half months there and enjoyed getting a chance to see friends and locations we hadn’t seen in many years.

The map below shows the route we traveled in 2023 from Arizona to New York to Florida. There is a link just below the map that will open the actual Google Map which permits you to zoom in on spots and pan around the map. Each red pin represents a stop and clicking on any of them will pop up a window with the links to any blog posts related to that specific location.

Click HERE to open Goggle Map

Our route from Arizona to Waterloo was influenced by a few factors. Visiting family in the Dallas and Cincinnati area were a couple of anchor points. A stop in northern Indiana wasn’t originally planned but we finally bit the bullet and decided to have a solar and lithium battery system installed on our motorhome in Nappanee Indiana in late April. Many of the points in between these stops were defined by the location of Elks Lodges along our general route and areas we wanted to explore. We have definitely come to appreciate the hospitality of the lodges to traveling Elks. If the lodge happens to be open during our stay, we get to meet all sorts of locals and find out about the area and maybe even get in a good meal. But if the lodge happens to be closed, we still can have a safe place to spend the night before moving on.

After our extended stay in the Finger Lakes, we headed south for warmer weather with the plans to winter in Florida. Even though we know better, we waited too long to book a site in Florida so we were forced to piece together a hodgepodge of different spots to get us through early April of next year. It isn’t ideal, but will give us the chance to explore other areas of Florida.

One of our stops was at a resort called The Great Outdoors (TGO for short) in Titusville near Cape Canaveral on the east coast of Florida. This is where we celebrated Christmas and finished out the year. For reasons I’ll explain in a future blog post, we booked a month at this rather pricey resort in order to get a feel for the area as well as the resort itself. The thinking was, if we like the place, we might end up buying an RV lot so we have a consistent place to stay in Florida in future years!

Owning a lot might seem like overkill in order to have a place to stay especially if we don’t always come back to Florida over the winter. But TGO has a program whereby lot owners can enter their empty lots into a rental program run by the resort. The site we are currently renting is one such lot. The proceeds from all those in the rental pool is divided up evenly to all the participating lot owners. Based on the past two years of rental data, if we don’t come back to Florida over the winter, the rental income will be enough to cover our HOA fees and the taxes on the lot for a full year. We aren’t buying a lot to make money, but we won’t be loosing money on an empty site. But if we come back for the 6 months over the “high season” in Florida, our site will cost us about $25 per day. At this point we have an accepted offer on a lot with the closing scheduled for mid January so we will have much more to talk about when the lot is officially ours.

Back to our 2023 travels. We only made it to 3 national parks this past year and one national monument that probably deserves to be a national park. All four of these visits were in parks we have been to before. But Saguaro NP and Chiricahua NM in Arizona, Hot Springs NP in Arkansas, and Shenandoah NP in Virginia are all big enough that we were able to find new hikes that we had not completed before in prior visits and given a chance, we will visit them again.

I have generated a couple of “heat maps” that show where we have camped. Darker red colors are an indication of how long we stayed in a given state. The first map is just for the 365 nights in 16 states we camped in 2023. Not surprisingly New York was the winning state this past year. The second map shows all seven and a half years of stops. We did not add any new states to our list so we are still missing 4 of the lower 48 states.

Our 2023 Camping Map

Our 7.5 Camping Map

To help understand what this lifestyle is costing us, I have tabulated some of the more pertinent data for 2023 and the past five years. Our travel pace, represented by both the number of stops and the average nights per stop, has slowed down somewhat. Having a 2 month stay in Tucson and over 5 months in Waterloo tends to help slow the pace down.

Just the Stats

The number of miles we drove the motorhome is up compared the prior 3 years but at least the cost for diesel did not increase. In fact, in 2022 it cost us 62 cents per mile for diesel but this year we are down to 45 cents per mile. Fuel still isn’t cheap, but at least it is heading in the right direction. It’s not clear why we traveled nearly 2000 miles less in the Jeep than we did last year. Maybe by spending so much time in western New York - a place we are quite familiar with - we didn’t need to travel as far to see some of the places we wanted to revisit.

In terms of the type of camping spot we stayed at, we spent more nights at Elks Lodges and private campgrounds this year but dramatically fewer nights at state parks. It’s a bit odd since we really like staying at state parks. But the split between which type of camping spot we stay at has more to do with what areas we want to stay at and for whatever reason, this year, state parks were not as prevalent in those places. Plus most state parks have a 14 day stay limit so when we opt to spend longer times in an area, state parks are not a viable option.

So besides getting our solar and lithium batteries installed on the rig and potentially getting an RV lot in Florida, we did have one other pretty big event during our travels this past year. We got to experience some pretty severe weather on our way thru Missouri this spring. We knew enough to be off the road before the predicted storm came thru. We escaped without experiencing a tornado and we survived the storm unscathed, but the 6 month old Jeep got pelted with a pretty bad hail storm. We spent a great deal of time dealing with the insurance company and the repair facility in order to get things back to new. It’s amazing how much damage a 10 minute storm was able inflict on the poor car.

As we have done in past year end reviews, we looked over all of the 38 stops we had in 2023 and attempt to come up with our favorites. Even though I will list the campground we stayed at for each winning location, the reason we picked the six stops had little to do with the campground and more to do with the area we were situated. For each stop we found worthy of our list, there is a short description of the stop, a link to the first blog post for that stop and a favorite picture or two. In chronological order, here is the list for 2023:

• Grapevine Elks Lodge Grapevine Texas - We aren’t typically big city people, and Grapevine is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which is by all measures a BIG city. But we have family living in the area and the Elks Lodge in Grapevine worked out quite well for our nine night stay. The lodge has a handful of RV spots with water and electric. We fit in an amazing amount of family time in the short stay and barely had any time for sightseeing. The kids have grown up a lot since our last visit and it was nice to have some dogs to play with.

Grapevine Blog Post

Shore of Grapevine Lake

Sasha Acts as Foot Warmer

• Seneca River RV Park Waterloo New York - The location of our over five month stop this past summer was pretty ideal. But Seneca River RV Park, where we had our seasonal site, left a lot to be desired. The fairly new campground seemed to be about 80% completed but was functional and I’ll leave it at that. Waterloo is well east of the area we used to live in Rochester, but close enough to easily drive in to visit with the many friends we have in the area. The advantage of this location is you’re in the heart of the Finger Lakes region of New York. There are lots of nearby state parks, waterfalls, wineries, breweries and the list goes on. Even after spending so much time in this spot, we felt there were things we didn’t get to do. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one very unexpected benefit of the area - a grocery store! People from the area would expect us to be referring to Wegmans, which is great, but the store in question is a Mennonite run store called Sauders. If you happen to be in the area, we recommend you check out this store.

First Waterloo Blog Post

One of Many Visits to the Erie Canal

Lots of Waterfalls to See - This is Taughannock Falls

• Waynesboro Elks Lodge Waynesboro Virginia - In the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, Waynesboro is located at the southern end of Shenandoah National Park and the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We stayed at the Elks lodge in town with two electric sites and access to water and a dump station, all on a beautiful property. We managed to get in some pretty drives and excellent hikes in the area but we barely scratched the surface so we could easily visit again and not be bored.

Waynesboro Blog Post

Shenandoah National Park

A Stop Along the Blue Ridge Parkway

• NC State Fairgrounds Raleigh North Carolina - The state fairgrounds is a big campground with lots of room if you’re not trying to stay during the fair or one of the NC State home football games! Raleigh has a lot of nice parks for hiking, museums and an incredible farmers market. If we hadn’t set a travel schedule, we could have easily spent a couple weeks there. The other benefit, for us at least, is my college roommate lives in the area and we had the chance to get together for dinner.

Raleigh NC Blog Post

Ornately Carved Log at Umstead State Park

Inside the Camera Obscura at NC Museum of Art

• St Augustine Elks Lodge St Augustine Florida - The oldest city in the USA, St Augustine has a lot to see and do. We stayed at the Elks Lodge located on Anastasia Island with 10 full hookup sites. Being right on the Atlantic coast, there are lots of state parks, nature preserves and beaches. There are also a couple of historic forts to visit and plenty to see in downtown. We also had the benefit of our timing. Visiting for 12 nights in late November thru early December, we got to head into downtown to see a very impressive Christmas light display.

St Augustine Blog Post

Castillo de San Marcos

Christmas Lights Downtown St Augustine

• The Great Outdoors Titusville Florida - We spent the last 3 weeks of 2023 (and into the new year) at a resort called The Great Outdoors - TGO for short. I’ll admit, this is one of those rare times where we stayed at a campground for the amenities. Located near Cape Canaveral, we wanted to explore this area of eastern Florida to see what it has to offer. It is by far the most expensive stop we have had and that is with the reduced monthly rate. But we had come here with the thoughts of possibly purchasing an RV lot and we wanted to see if we liked the vibe of the resort and found enough other things to do in the vicinity. Bottom line is we liked it. I especially liked the woodworking shop that is available to join. We probably won’t get into all of the activities and groups that the resort has to offer but we plan on giving it a try.

Blog Post Yet to Be Written

Red-shouldered Hawk

Soon to Be Our Lot

So what will 2024 bring? Well we have through the beginning of April planned out with stops in Florida including a state park and a Habitat for Humanity build in Vero Beach. Beyond that, we really haven’t put any concerted effort in our plans for the summer and fall. Possibly the New England area - Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts? Who knows but we should probably get our plans started.