It’s been a pretty good year! Both of us feel like it was one of the most “full” years of our lives so far. While we’re thankful to be taking the winter off to stay in one place and go skiing a lot, we’re also anxiously awaiting the spring to hit the road again.

So, the route! Before we left we had a rough idea of where we wanted to go. Below is the final route we took.

We put about 4500 miles on the RV and another 5000 or so on the car. Mapquest puts the route at about 74 hours of driving, but we found that we take about 30% longer than GPS usually says to get anywhere because the RV can’t always go the speed limit on the highway or hills, so I’d guess we drove the RV over 100 hours.

Given that the RV is from 1989 and has 100,000 miles on it now, the fact that we only broke down three times is pretty pretty good I think. One was a cracked coolant hose connector on the Icefields Parkway in Canada, one was the battery terminals got corroded in Kamloops, BC, and one was the catalytic converter died on the Olympic Peninsula but we liked the fact that that breakdown meant we got to visit Ocean Shores, WA. We’re pretty sure we need to replace a few of the suspension and steering bushings before we head out again next year (don’t let us forget) but those don’t count yet 🙂

I’m so happy that we played it by ear as we went. It meant we got to go to Canada. We got to hang out near Yellowstone  and Glacier National Parks for about three weeks each because we couldn’t get enough of them. We got to meet lots of locals along the way who went above and beyond to make us welcome where ever we were. Major thanks to Sally, Scott, Ruth, Jenn, Sarah, Dave, Bill, Shelly, Evie and everyone else who we met along the way (there were a lot you!). I hope we get to meet up again sometime sooner or later.

If you want to go back and check out the places we visited, you can check out the “Travel” category. I think it’s a pretty good approximation of our most interesting posts (though they aren’t anywhere close to our most popular posts).

That all said, don’t get the impression we’re done with this RVing thing! We will probably do another planning post come spring, but so far we’re looking at slowing down and doing Central and southwestern Colorado for the summer festival season and then heading into Utah for the string of National Parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon etc). From there, it will depend on where we choose to go for the winter and how late in the year it is, but California/Nevada or Arizona/New Mexico are both possibilities. We’ll see. Either way, we’re not done yet!