16 Sep 2023 - Stick a Fork in It! It's all Yeller! + Final Stats

 

Our 2023 RV adventure is in the books.  We departed West Omaha this morning at 0845 hrs in the rain. 

Iowa appeared soon, and three hours to the minute later and 169 miles later we rolled into Griff's RV Park, our launching and recovery point this year.  

We had another fantastic RV travel year!  We are thankful our health allows us to travel.  We saw literally hundreds of  friends, relatives, military comrades and Alliance Allies, and we saw a lot of the great United States!  We won't regurgitate a lot about the trip as it is already documented in all of the blog posts. Just like last year, we had no ER visits, no veterinary visits, one minor truck issues (upper radiator hose) and no RV issues to speak of.  Neither Doreen or I even had so much as a cough or cold the whole trip.  We are very tired but a good "tired" and after a winter reset we will be ready to hit it hard again ~1 Apr next year!  Likely another visit to Texas followed by our annual Alliance National Rally!!  For now it is back to reality, back to the gym, knock out the physicals and all the other appointments we mentioned a couple days ago.  

Thank you to everyone who we reconnected with during the trip.  Thank you to Alliance for building a solid coach and for the huge FamAlly we have joined!  And a huge thanks to our son Dan Schellhase who stops by our house weekly if not more often to make sure everything is OK on the home front. We could not do this without him!  

Thanks to all who followed along with us with the blog.  Writing a blog every night is a lot of work not to mention editing and cropping the pictures, and shrinking them so they will upload efficiently.  You are getting it uncut and unfiltered - what happens along the way you are reading about.  And now we are done, except for the final stats (below), and we "stick a fork in it"!  It's done!

The shell for next year's blog has been built.  Expect an update in there as our 2024 trip planning happens.  Book mark it if you wish: 

https://schellhasetravels2024.blogspot.com/ 

2023 Final Stats:  

This is campground #42 of 42 (37 last year)

# States Traveled Through So Far This Trip, in order: 30 (IA, MO, KS, OK, TX, LA, MS, AL,GA, TN, KY, OH, IN, MI, WI, IA, NE, CO, UT, UT,  CO, AZ, NM (4 corners!),  AZ, NV, UT, WY, CO, KS, NE, IA)  (20 last year)

# States left to visit on this trip: 0

Baseball Parks Visited So Far This Trip:  1 (Globe Life Field - Texas Rangers)

Lighthouses visited:  1 (Biloxi Lighthouse)

Lighthouses climbed:  0

Point to point travel miles:  8721 miles (6559 last year)

  - Avg point to point travel miles between campgrounds:  198 miles

Vicinity miles:  5095 miles (3913 last year)

  - Avg vicinity miles:  118 miles

Total miles driven:  13816 miles (10472 last year)

Total point to point driving time:  178 hrs 09 minutes

Total diesel fuel purchased: 1256.507 gals (930.173 last year)

Total diesel fuel cost:  $4889.84 

Average diesel fuel cost/gal:  $3.906 ($5.10 last year)

Max diesel fuel cost:  $4.899 (Tusayan AZ - Grand Canyon) ($5.599 last year)

Min diesel fuel cost:  $3.139 (San Antonio TX) ($4.439 last year)

Avg MPG:  11.48 miles/gal (11.43 last year)

Cost/mi of operation:  $0.35 ($0.46 last year)

# Nights at end of this stay:  199 (Includes Griff's start) (189 last year)

Total lodging cost:  $8062.59  (includes Griff's start) ($8091.30 last year)

Average cost/night:  $40.52 ($42.81 last year)