The Full Trip

Introduction

In the later Winter / early Spring of 2023 we drove across the country and back to visit family and friends. Our Subaru Ascent towed our 19′ Intech Sol Horizon travel trailer. The trip took 56 days and we covered 7,668 miles. Here’s the full story.

Thoughts on the Trip

The Blog

Wait? You’re still doing this? Yes, we are, but this is the last post.

Are we glad we blogged?

Yes, absolutely. We loved being able to reach a close circle of friends, and later, a wider circle of friends from the various Internet groups we belong to. We apologize to that extended circle that we decided to not be public about our trip. House break-ins for RVers is a real thing. We didn’t want to come home to a ransacked house so we kept it to a minimum mostly family and few close friends that checked the house when we were gone.

We also loved re-reading it ourselves, to remind us of where we were. Odd, huh? Yes, we forget what we saw sometimes. We saw so much. We can see re-reading this, at least partially, well in the future.

Did blogging become a chore? Yes, absolutely. Blogging isn’t nearly the glamourous “influencer life” that we’re all lead to believe (not that we aspired to that but you get the idea). Some days it was hard to find interesting things to write about and some days had more than we could write about. Mostly it became a job that we grew to really dislike; taking the photos with the blog in mind, the writing, the editing, the proofreading.

Will we do it again? We have no idea whatsoever.

Pace

On the way to Phoenix we traveled 3,527 mile, averaging 251 miles/day, only stopping for 2 non-travel days. On the way back home, we travelled 4,141 miles, averaging 158 miles/day, but with 12 non-travel days. The return trip was far more enjoyable than the outbound trip.

But both of these numbers are pathetic numbers if you are trying to get somewhere. Part of the low numbers is because setup and tear-down take more than just a few minutes. Travel days caused us to lose 60-90 minutes of travel times as we buttoned things up for travel. Another reason is that towing a trailer is fatiguing is you’ve already put in a fair bit of time just packing up. A few years back we took a trip in the Jeep Wrangler (a vehicle not known for comfort). We made almost 550 miles in that day. Owners of some Class A RVs report easy days of 400-600 miles. Set up and tear down eats into your tow time.

So try to not do more than 250-300 miles a day. And certainly try not to string multiple 300-350 mile days one after the other. It’ll wear on you. 200-250 miles and in by mid afternoon was wonderful.

On that note, try to schedule it so that you’ve got a few stops of 3-5 days. You’ ll need recharge time. You’re also going to need to do life maintenance like shopping for groceries, doing laundry, and refilling your propane.

Relax

Don’t make hard and fast plans but do have an idea a few days out where you can stay. Weather can push you around. We had visions of going up to the Grand Canyon, crossing northern NM and visiting Amarillo. That didn’t happen because of weather. Going out west the only hard date we had was a March 1st arrival because we’d made reservations in Phoenix where we were landing to visit family. Mostly we were next day the day or a couple days out. Plans were often made while the other drove or was cooking. On that note…

Schedules

Don’t set a hard arrival time unless you have to. The pressure of having a date, and 3,700 miles between you and it made for some long, long days.

Side Trips

Short stays, unless you have a specific visit in mind, like Graceland, are worthless except to rest. We learned that heading west. Twice we stopped for only 2 nights, that doesn’t give you really anytime to do anything. Sorry Houston, sorry Charleston…

There aren’t any right and wrong answers. These are just something we are very aware of now.

Routing

Choose “avoid highways” when you can if it won’t make the day stupid long or route you through stop and go traffic that are downtown areas. Do it if you have the time. We found so many cool things and awesome places for lunch. Which leads me to the next point…

We ate our main meal at lunch on travel days. For dinner we either had either leftovers or something like pasta for minimal effort after a long day on the road. “Real” cooking was reserved for days when we stayed several days at a campsite.

Stability versus Freedom

When we headed west we only had 1 campsite booked, the long term stay at our Phoenix destination. The first night’s stay we booked the evening before we left. This was a common pattern. When we arrived at that day’s destination one would cook dinner and the other would find us a place to stay for the next day (two if they were ambitious). It didn’t always work out, sometimes a Harvest Host wouldn’t respond and we’d have to scramble to find some place to stay with only a few hours to go (hello Cracker Barrel). (Susan here: Some CBs are better than others, feel safer than others. Still not a favorite of mine. I always sleep lightly when I’m in a CB.)

We continued like this on the way back with one exception, when we approached Easter we found that many sites were booked solid. One morning we spent about 90 minutes finding a place to stay. Realizing that, we booked the next 9 or 10 days!

Not having plans did give us some anxiety. (Paul here, I’m a planner, last month was my month to cook and I knew what’s for dinner for the last 2 weeks of the trip!) (Susan here: I like to know where I’m sleeping but I learned to not stress over it, that there’s always somewhere.) But it also gave us great freedom. When leaving Texas to visit the Lake Charles, LA area we found that they were socked in with rain for the next few days. So what did your intrepid travelers do? We went where the weather was forecast to be better. And while staying at the Great Smokies, we enjoyed the area so much we just booked an additional day. (This was part of the 90 minutes mentioned above.)

The reality is that it’s a stability versus freedom tradeoff. You must be flexible, especially with regards to the weather and to site availability. Harvest Hosts and Cracker Barrels really help here. We found that doing a full hookup campsite for one or more nights then boondocking at a Harvest Host or Cracker Barrel for a couple nights really worked out well and kept costs down. On average we only spent about $20 per Harvest Host, and zero at few, but that’s only because they were closed. If they had a restaurant, well we were on it! But that extra expense was ok, eating at local places is part of the journey.

Finding Campsites

It is imperative that you have your game on when finding campsites. We used 2 primary sources, paid subscriptions to RVLife.com and HarvestHosts.com, we used both of these extensively.

Google, TripAdvisor, etc… are just too cumbersome (Susan here: but useful sometimes). Actually, HH can be cumbersome at times but we had some incredible experiences staying at these places. We used RVTripWizard for our path and then used the HH app to find specific hosts. RVTripWizard is not integrated with Harvest Host which is a shame. However it has national, state, county, city and private/commercial campgrounds. In addition to missing Harvest Hosts it is also missing the Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds. We didn’t even know they existed until we were chatting with some other campers.

There are many other commercial or free services out there, usually for boondocking, but we’re currently happy with what we have.

Time Management / Life Maintenance

When you live on the road, even “just” for two months, time management becomes critical. There are boring “life” things that still need to get done and those take time.

It only took us a day or two to realize that you should fill the gas tank during a driver change. Initially we were trying to fill up as infrequently as possible. This is inefficient since you’re already stopping for a driver change. Why not do that at a gas station!? If you’re getting great milage you can probably just do a rest-stop driver change or lunch break change (susan here: unless you’re in TX getting 5-8 MPG then you’re crossing your fingers that you make it to the next gas station). Being stationary on a driving day is a bad idea so we tried to minimize that. With that said, there are decent health reason to get up and move about for a few minutes during every stop.

Grocery shopping was sometimes easy, sometimes horrible. We really tried to not bring the trailer into the store parking lot, but sometimes you needed to because you destination was in the middle of nowhere! There were great grocery stores (we’re looking at you H.E.B. Stores in TX) and some really dismal ones (we won’t name and shame).

Laundry was also a chore. At home you can just throw a load in and do something else. We don’t like doing that at a campground, you might encounter a rude person who dumps your wet clothes on the table. Some machines tell you when it will be done so you can be there, some don’t! And some use water that’s too hot and dryers that too hot and you find a few things shrunk. All part of the adventure and stories.

But guess what? One person can do laundry while the other grocery shops. Now that’s time management! We didn’t realize that until very late in the trip.

Texas

Yeah, Texas. Texas get a whole section. There is no way around Texas in the winter, it is just too cold up north to travel if your RV isn’t equipped for it. So you need to go through it. It isn’t fun. That’s not Texas’ fault. The western part of it isn’t fun because it is huge and empty. (susan here: and windy, don’t forget WINDY!!!) When you are taking I-10 it takes 872 miles to go from one side to another. Fun fact: there are 880 exit numbers, (more if you count the A/B/C exits of the same number). I overheard someone say that that is longer that the other two parts, western end to either, ocean, and they’re right! East Texas border to the Atlantic in Jacksonville FL on 1-10 is 782 miles, and 795 miles to the Pacific, ending at the Santa Monica Pier in CA.

So why is this bad? The western half is the bad half because it is empty, nothing to look at, nothing to stop for, no gas stations. No man’s land if you will. Planning gas stops was incredibly difficult here. Sometimes the stations didn’t even has any! We never let it go below half a tank in this part of Texas. It is also very windy, but that’s probably true for all of the Great Plains. Wind isn’t fun when you are pulling a travel trailer. The best thing to do is slow down. But… if you recall from the blog, the speed limit is 80mph, the trucks are doing at least 90 so even if you speed up to 70mph from 55-60 mph the trucks closing speeds are still 20mph faster and that’s a brisk closing speed-you can feel the the push of air coming. Spooky is an understatement and at times terrifying would be a lot more accurate.

Oh, and it is uphill going well, we got 5.8mpg on one of the tankfuls.

All the Posts, Yes, There Will be a Quiz

This rest of this post is essentially the table of contents of the trip. You probably don’t want to read it all, I can’t imagine how much time it would take, but it’s all here if you want it.