We love our RV and since we live a life where extended travel is an option, we have developed our personal, “RV style.” We like to keep our travel days short, no more than 4 hours which includes the take down, drive, and set up time. We stay at least two nights if possible and ideally longer. This leads us to do “deep dive” trips like the one to Arkansas last spring and the fall trip that focused on western Kentucky, Indiana and southern Illinois. This is enabling us to visit every single Missouri State Park and Historic site. I can see us continuing this style for the foreseeable future.
But when it comes to long distance travel, we needed a new style. When I was growing up, my family vacations consisted of car and motel travel. We mostly stayed at Holiday Inns or Best Westerns. My parents took me to all 48 states by the time I was 16 years old. Below are a few snapshots from those trips.
So when my wife and I first started out together, 25 years ago, I tried one such trip. We drove to Mobile Alabama to recreate a childhood memory of visiting the battleship Alabama and then stopped in Gulfport, Mississippi. From there, we stumbled onto a great beach hotel in Orange Beach. We left there to drive to Destin, Florida, only to find there was a huge convention and there were no hotel rooms available. So we phoned the hotel in Orange Beach and drove back there. That was the last open ended driving trip we took. Despite the heavy video and photography equipment we carried around on that trip, there are not many photos. The one below was from a stop we made at Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile, Alabama. The kids in the picture are not with us.
Instead, we got into trips where everything was planned before we left. We had great success with that style because of limited vacation time and because by nature, we are both the planning type. Most trips involved air travel, i.e. flying to a city like San Francisco, or NY, London, Paris, or the cruises we took.
But here were are in 2023 with more free time and no desire to take a flight. So when deciding to visit friends just outside of Phoenix, we knew we wanted to drive. And so we created our new style of travel, one that I actually found very affordable and dog friendly. By using Hotels.com, we always had a place to stay each night before setting out for the day, but we did not plan the whole trip at the start. We had decided to stop in Tulsa and Amarillo but that was all I knew the day we left.
We kept an eye on the weather and also considered hotel prices. I was worried about inflation shock but the opposite happened. Compared to the hotels I had been booking over the last 25 years, I was finding great prices. The biggest bonus of all was that nearly all our stays included breakfast and not just a dried out pastry. These were hearty; bacon and eggs meals that enabled us to stick with a two meal a day policy. We generally had dinner around 4 or 5 each evening. Finding dog friendly hotels was not a challenge though we did encounter some pet fees and handled each one uniquely. But on average, it was not too painful.
Gas cost us about 3.05 per gallon but again, no sticker shock because instead of the 9-10 miles to the gallon we get in the RV, the Equinox gets over 30 mpg. The car is an absolute pleasure to drive and handled well despite being a four-cylinder. It is the best car I have ever owned in terms of gas mileage and driving friendly features like blind spot monitoring and lane departure warnings.
We used the Roadtrippers application that I mentioned in earlier post. This was a great way to locate the Route 66 gems and also Rest Areas. We drove an average of six hours a day and our round trip took us about 3600 miles. Our longest day was the drive from Santa Fe to Winslow Arizona because of our stop the the Petrified National Park, but it was well worth it.
This is a style of travel that I look forward to repeating in the coming years. We are fortunate to be able to manage both , at least for now. Stay tune, the next few weeks I will be back to covering RV topics with our visit to the St. Louis RV and Travel show and soon, our spring RV trip will be underway. Thanks for your support and if you know anyone else that would enjoy this newsletter, please share.