RV Adventures

It seems a little weird to be writing this post when Summer has started. I guess that just shows you how late in the “Spring Season” we returned home. We have been home for a couple of weeks. In fact, we have taken a couple of short RV trips in our local area already! Anyway, on to the wrap-up.

The trip home was fairly uneventful. We did Las Cruces, New Mexico back to New York in four days of driving, broken up by a couple of longer stops. Overnights involved two Harvest Hosts (a Route 66 fast food joint and a farmer’s market) and one of our favorites, the Tom Sawyer RV Park on the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas.

While parked on the Mississippi River, we FINALLY were able to visit Mud Island Park in the city of Memphis, prior we always seemed to be here in the off-season. Not this time! The park has “The Mississippi Riverwalk,” a scale replica art installation of the entire Mississippi River, complete with running water. Unfortunately, the park has been allowed to fall into disrepair over the years. Much of the informational signage was faded and unreadable. But we still enjoyed walking the length of the Mississippi.

The whole concrete sculpture was 1/2 mile long. Each 30 inches (approximately 1 step) would take you 1 mile down the river. Each topographical contour represented a 5 foot change in elevation.

Where did we go?

Looking at the map of our travels, you can see we kept wandering back to Las Cruces. Except for getting across the country and back, we spent all our time in the Southwest. The total number of miles driven was 7,358.3 miles over 141.27 hours of driving (yup, we are that exact with our numbers). We averaged 52.2 miles per hour in the Blue Flame over the course of the entire trip. 4,050.0 miles were put on the Jeep.

The price of fuel

Everyone, including us, keeps watching the price of fuel. For us, we watch the price of diesel fuel. The price per gallon keeps going up and up and up. When we left in January, we paid $3.20 per gallon. When we got back to New York, we paid $5.56 per gallon. Check out the graph below (I’m such a geek!). The big jump in the price of fuel happened when Russia invaded Ukraine (not surprising). There are two lines in my graph . The blue line is the price displayed on the pump. The red line is our discounted price…we belong to fleet fuel program that gets us a discount. Thank goodness! Our total fuel cost this Spring was $4,154.17. Ouch.

Overnight stays

Here is the breakdown of where we parked this Spring Season.

• Number of nights on the road: 138
• Number of nights of “free” camping (i.e. boondocking): 37
• Average cost per night: $25.34
• Most expensive cost per night: $74.92 – Monte Vista RV park in Mesa, Arizona (expensive, but worth it to be able to visit with some of our RVing friends, and enjoy the hot tubs).

Next?

We are back in New York for the summer with a couple of short little trips planned. When our builder is ready to start framing the new house, we will head back to Las Cruces. Hopefully the foundation is being poured this week. But like everything else, supply chain issues get in the way. House updates will be at https://house.cjsquare.com.