Fall Colors – Part 1

One trip we always mentioned that we wanted to do was a trip to the eastern seaboard for the fall colors. We thought we would get to the Northeast in the fall and let the weather drive us south. We mentioned this to our friends George and Marcia, they were on board. We left on September 10th and would meet them on the way as they usually travel faster than we do.

As with any trip from your home base, the first day or two is always familiar. The same route, same towns, and oftentimes the same campgrounds. Our first nite was one of our favorites, Homolovi State Park. We got there and it was pouring rain with high winds (normal for Homolovi). I just hooked up the electricity and no other amenities. Didn’t even disconnect.

More I-40 travel the next day. Our stop was the Native American casino at Sky City. You can get spots there for around $20/night IF you ask for the discount. It is a decent RV park except for the terrible road into the RV park, it is abysmal. The park is on a slight incline so if you head into a spot you need to disconnect to get your trailer level. However, if you come in from the other direction, you can lift the tongue, stay connected and be level! We also set up Starlink here for the internet, worked great!

Yet another I-40 day. When heading east, you don’t have too many options in the western states. That changes when you get to Texas. We made our way through Albuquerque and ate at a local place off the road, Vicks Vittles. It was pretty good and it is always fun to eat locally. We stopped at Ute Lake State Park for the night. We stayed here with George and Marcia the last time we headed east with them. It is a good campground, with loads of space between the sites but it usually has a lot of bugs. It had a great sunset:

Our 4th day on the road started with finally detouring from I-40 and heading NE a bit to the Oklahoma panhandle. We passed through Dalhart TX and I read something interesting in their Wiki entry.

One more night before a bit of a break. We ended up at an Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) campground at Fort Supply Lake near Fort Supply OK. We had a site that backed up onto the lake that was very nice, a bit windy. The next day was eastbound entirely in Oklahoma. We had been on the road for 4 full days and nights without disconnecting the trailer at all. It was time to take a short timeout.

We got to another ACOE campground at Brush Creek Park. It was right on the Arkansas River, just below the dam at Keystone Lake. We were just west of Tulsa OK. The next day was a ‘down’ day, not that we didn’t do anything, we just didn’t travel with the Airstream. It was interesting camping by the dam, many people were fishing the river and a horn would sound repeatedly whenever there was a change in the water discharge amount.

We skirted around Tulsa as we left and headed NE to our rendezvous with George and Marcia at Twin Bridges State Park. We had lunch in Claremore OK, the hometown of Will Rogers. It was very obvious that he was from that area and a huge amount of everything had his name on it. They are even in Rogers County! We got to drive along Route 66 for a long stretch primarily because I am too cheap to pay for a turnpike and back roads are better. We met the Chens at the campground and got to visit a bit with them.

George and Marcia had some friends/relatives to visit before our next connection so we parted ways in the AM. We headed into Missouri for our next stop. We took a selfie at lunch:

The evening found us at a private campground called Ruby’s Landing. My parents owned a campground for 10 years so it is always fun to stop at a rustic campground. But, this one might have been a bit TOO rustic. We were there on a Saturday night that happened to coincide with some Halloween camping event. Many scouts were camping in tents. Many others running around making noise, some being chased by a guy with a chainsaw and mask. It wasn’t too noisy in the late hours, luckily. I am glad we weren’t there for 2 nights.

Our next stop was just north of St Louis MO at a county park. Very nice location, good sites, and lots of trails around a man-made lake/river overflow. An uneventful drive through some very beautiful areas. But we keep pushing on to our next meetup location in PA. Our satellite setup is working great, with the TV on the left and Internet on the right (one looks to the south, the other to the north). The top of the truck is a great location when we don’t disconnect.

Following our theme of skirting around towns, we did the same with St Louis and continued ENE to the next state. Staying on a US highway instead of an Interstate highway we ended up south of Terra Haute IN at a county park. It was a beautiful park, a bit tight for the trailer but we made it. There were numerous restored historical buildings around a nice lake.

Another day, another state. This is much different than traveling in western states. Go around Indianapolis and end up at the Buck Creek State Park near Springfield IN. This is a beautiful campground, with lots of grass and trees. We saw a couple of deer wandering around. The camp hosts were very friendly.

Ohio was next, I couldn’t find a better route so we went right through the gut of Columbus OH. It was not a real issue but as we got to Zanesville I saw there was a Texas Roadhouse so that is where we ate. Downtown Zanesville was much more difficult with the trailer as it seemed much older and narrower. The reward was better than the risk. We spent the night at Barkcamp State Park. It had a large camp area for horses and a large infestation of flying stink bugs. The terrain was beginning to remind me of what I thought West Virginia would look like.

The next day confirmed my suspicions, we drove through Wheeling WV on our way to Pittsburgh PA. Our final stop was Penn Wood Airstream Park. We stopped here in 2017, enjoyed our stay, and decided to come back. We were here for 4 nights, and George and Marcia were meeting us here in a couple of days.

We really needed to do some laundry so that was first on our list, along with a Chinese buffet. The next day we had our main meal at a local farm-to-table restaurant. Took a little walk to the Climax tunnel. This is an old railroad bed that was repurposed into a 28-mile walk/bike trail, we only did a small portion of it.

George and Marcia showed up right on schedule. We did a little drive on the back roads of this area of Pennsylvania and took them also to the tunnel to see the area.

The fall colors had not changed all that much in this area yet, not to the degree we were looking at. We continued moving NE, but that is in the next installation.

70000 miles!

We purchased our current Airstream in January of 2013. It is a 2012 31′ Classic. Since the 31′ was not the most desirable floorplan (they no longer make the floorplan) and the trailer had been on the lot for over 6 months we got a pretty good deal on it. We just had to drive to Portland OR to purchase it.

We had our ’92 Airstream, given to us by my parents, for about 12 years prior and they had it for about 10 before that! I had no idea how many miles were put on that trailer. I know we took the ’92 all over the western states, to Canada once and Mexico three times. I was determined to keep track of things better this time!

Google to the rescue! I was still working when we got the trailer and my career was in technology so what better way to track than a spreadsheet? Google allowed me to do this but keep the information in the cloud without needing a PC/Mac with software installed specifically for spreadsheets (Microsoft Office). I can keep track of things on my phone.

I started tracking after our trip bringing the new trailer home. I even added on mileage for the trailer being transported from Jackson Center OH to the trailer dealership in Spokane WA and then the mileage to get it to Portland. However, that is not our mileage.

The next question was how actually to track the mileage that we travel. I know that some big rigs have odometers that physically attach to the hub of their trailers but I didn’t even think of that or probably didn’t want to pay for one. One app that I found for the iPhone was MapMyDrive. It worked pretty well, as long as I could remember to start it when we began each drive.

A few months into our tracking, I added a few items to each drive. One was the latitude and longitude of each stop. This was in anticipation of having some type of dynamic map that shows our path for each trip. But, what path did we take?

It is always fun to go back and look at some trips but we don’t always take the most direct route. If we have time, I don’t like to travel exclusively on Interstate freeways, major off roads have a much greater appeal. But how do I remember where we went? Once again Google to the rescue.

After every trip, drive, etc. I sit down at the laptop and use Google Maps to lay out where we drove. I start with the starting point and the destination and drag the route to show the correct path. By now, I don’t use MapMyDrive and use Google Maps exclusively. I then create a goo.gl link with the path. For example, here is a drive we did in 2017 when we drove from Walmart in Greensboro NC to Walmart/Ashley furniture in Durham NC.

Our route
Meandering around Greensboro

On this leg, we had some things to do before we got to our next stop. We left where we spent the night (Walmart), stopped at a laundromat, teeth cleaning for Roxie, had lunch at Longhorn, then stopped at Bed Bath and Beyond for a wedding gift (unmarked dot by Walmart) and headed on to the next stop.

With Google Maps, I can put in all the stops in order and it will figure out a path. I can then tweak it to match our actual path. In this situation, if I had only put in the starting and ending points, we would have missed all the extra mileage that we put on the trailer.

Tracking the mileage accurately gives you a baseline on which to apply service items. This way I knew that we got almost 50K miles on our Michelin tires on the trailer. I also knew we got over 68K miles on our original brakes. These numbers are very helpful!

Here is a snippet of the spreadsheet with some recent info:

This shows us creeping in on 70000 miles on our trailer and 1900 full-time nights. With all this spreadsheet and map tracking, I feel that I am easily within 1% of accuracy.

I also keep track of our nightly camping expenses since we started full-timing in 2017. Here is a snippet of that part of the spreadsheet:

I track all the above so I can get a ‘total’ cost at the end of the year and an average cost. I can also keep track of what states/provinces we have been to. The current list is:

Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon Territory. 33 states and 3 provinces.

At this writing, we are officially at 71627.3 miles and still going. We are getting ready to head east and add more states to the list!