2012 comes to an end

Another year goes down in the books.  It was marked by my second retirement, the last one hopefully, and several of our friends' retirements as well, must be getting older :-)  Our son's marriage, visiting family that we haven't seen in a long time, traveling with both of Jan's sisters, and being fancy free on the road, a long time dream.  We dealt with our internet and phone issues and are very pleased with the results.  We changed from 2 MacBook Pro laptops and 2 iPhones to 1 MacBook Pro, an iPad, and 2 iPhones, and are happy with that set up.  We got a new mail forwarder and address which helped our motorhome insurance, but hurt our Jeep insurance, hard to figure.  We did not use our kayaks at all and are reevaluating our water needs.  In fact, I think I will be selling my kayak.  We both have bikes now and enjoyed them a lot, and continue to enjoy them.  We were quite active physically, but as Jan says and she's right, I could be even more active for my own good ;-)

Thought it might be interesting to post a few of our stats throughout the year:

We stayed at 52 different campgrounds, and only one would we not go back to.  We had wanted to increase our time in each campground for two reasons, one to slow down, and two to save money, and we did okay, but want to extend it a bit more.
We averaged $28/night, with zero dollars being the low, and $59.35 being the high, all in all a bit more than we wanted to spend.  

We drove 11,524 miles in the motorhome, and drove the Jeep approximately 15,000 miles.  Our longest day in the motorhome was 416 miles and the shortest was 20 miles between campgrounds.  We wanted shorter days and we did very well in this department.

We used 1900 gallons of diesel fuel with the average price $3.99/gal.  The most we paid was $4.35, and the lowest was $3.66.  Slowing down gained us more than 15% in fuel economy!

We slept in 12 different states.

We met our budget in terms of campgrounds and fuel.

Looking to next year I anticipate fuel to be a bit more, and the campground prices to go up a bit that we will try to offset by staying a little longer at each one.  Also we endeavored to stay at more State and National Parks, and we did, but their prices are creeping up as well.  We believe we will drive a little less next year as right now we are contemplating staying on the East coast for a change, and will try to get up into Canada.  We have about 75,000 miles on our motorhome now so will have to get the first engine service, a valve adjustment, but are not anticipating any large maintenance issues, but as you observed this year, sometimes things just pop up!  

All in all a very good year, and if our government doesn't completely fall apart, we are looking forward to another wonderful year!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYBODY!!!