So we are now at the beginning of November! It has officially been one year since we signed on our home in Oregon and began this crazy, beautiful journey.
Our last post was in August and I apologize for the time in between, but life has been busy, and I am technically challenged, so was struggling with some blog issues. Last I posted Chad was busting ass to get everything done by September 10, the date we were leaving on a 37 day road trip! Well he got everything he needed to get done before that date. Our foundation and all the mechanical underneath is buttoned up and sealed for the Winter. As soon as spring graces us with her presence, work can begin and walls can start going up!
We left on our epic trip and had an amazingly, wonderful time. We traveled to like 19 states, 6 National Parks and more historical monuments and sites then I can remember! We chose this trip as an experience for our children to learn about our history in a real way, hands on, being in the same places some of these things happened, but also to feel and be in it. We also have always wanted to travel to the New England States in the Fall. We had the time and opportunity to take an extended road trip with nothing to hold us back! There are so many highlights, and if you are interested please contact me, but I am not gonna go into all that right now. Highly recommend road trips and traveling when you can, not someday!
There is the question of the day. How did you manage to do this trip, when you are living on a budget? No we did not dip into our house money or put it all on a credit card. Most of you know that know me, is that I thrive off planning our vacations as economical as possible. My quest, the cheaper it is, the more times we get to travel. So I began the quest to see if we could make this happen. It quickly became apparent that we would need to drive and take the travel trailer otherwise it would be completely out of our reach.
By driving and staying in campgrounds we would cut our cost by over half. By having the trailer we would be able to eat the majority of our meals in the trailer and the cost savings there is extraordinary. The average cost of our nightly stay was $50. When we stayed in state campgrounds average cost was about $26, when we stayed in KOA it was about $80. I would have preferred to stay in more state campgrounds, but the KOA’s were very convenient to the big cities and traveling over an hour to see the those cities each day was just not worth it. Gas varied, but overall we paid the same as in Montana or less. We got robbed a couple of times for convenience but overall pretty good. The truck and trailer averaged 13 miles to the gallon which is pretty freakin good. We ended up traveling over 9000 miles!!!! When we first budgeted this I totally did not factor in all the traveling from places we were staying to the sites we were seeing, so we ended up going over 3000 miles more then we budgeted! Whoops…. 90% of the places we visited were free. We paid entrance or bought tickets to 5 places, this was huge as you know entrance fees for 6 can add up quite quickly. We ate at the trailer or packed a meal 95 out of the 102 meals we only ate out 7 times! These were mainly in the bigger cities when we were not getting back until very late, or we wanted to experience a specific restaurant. This was huge, because for our family to eat out for an entire day would cost us $150 or more easily. That would have been $14,250 more!!!! WTF….. Even if we would have taken that down to two meals a day you are looking at 10 grand! So I guess the morale of the story is if you really want it, you can make it happen. I will not be cooking burritos, hamburgers or hotdogs for some time!
Again, if you have specific questions or want to pick my brain, you know where I am at.
Toodles for now, and again thank you for following us in this.
