October 2019 – Flight of 5

Here it is! Overnights in red, significant stops in blue.

Distance traveled: 25,007 miles
Time on the road: 2 years, 15 days (minus 102 days in Winter ’17/’18, which we spent in our Maryland house prior to its sale).
States visited: 35. Missed N Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, W Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, all of New England, and Hawaii / Alaska. It was never our goal to hit all 50 (or 48), but we did regret missing the Northeast, as it was a casualty of our unexpectedly late start.
Time West of Rockies vs. Time East of Rockies: 89% / 11% Wow. I knew we had biased our travels to the West, but I didn’t realize it was so lopsided until working out this stat. A good bit of that had to do with opting for the second year and deliberately covering less ground. Much more of it, however, had to do with the expanded version of the feeling we got once we reached the mountains for the first time in August ’17. We’d been doing our best to give the rest of the country equal time in our where-do-we-settle mental space, yet somewhere in Wyoming or Montana or Colorado we looked at each other and said “what are we thinking??” We kept up the struggle to be unbiased, but at that point we “knew.”
National Parks Visited: 20 (of 61)
National Park Service Sites Visited: 60+. That’s a lot of Junior Ranger badges!
Rivers Floated / Rafted: 5. Snake, Meramec, Animas, Colorado (twice), Deschutes (twice). Wait, no. Make that 4. Didn’t quite do the Snake…
Oceans swum in: 3. Pacific, Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico. Stretching a bit… you have to count the Gulf as separate for this, and what we did in the Atlantic was more akin to wading.
KOAs : 5
Colorado River Crossings: 4
Mississippi River Crossings: 3
Car breakdowns requiring towing: 2
Motorhome breakdowns requiring towing: 1 (though consensus afterwards was that it didn’t really need to be towed)
Worst/most difficult driving weather: Strong, gusty crosswinds with rain on two occasions — in Texas and eastern Colorado. Crosswinds are brutal.
Coldest overnight temperature: 26 in Pinnacles National Park
Hottest temperature: Low 100s in Moab
Most difficult road: NF-23 between Randle and Trout River in Washington. See ‘Penultimate.’ This was just dumb.
Most difficult road, runners up: Highway 1 between Leggett and the Pacific Coast in CA, Highway 190 between Stovepipe Wells (Death Valley) and Panamint Springs in CA. The hot brake smell is unpleasant on multiple axes.
Highest elevation (in motorhome): 12,183’
Lowest elevation: -260’
Amusement parks visited: 4 (Cedar Point, Magic Mountain, Disneyland, Legoland)
Middle of the night vomit sessions: 3 tops. With three kids, that’s pretty extraordinary. And even more so, every time they managed to go outside first. More than I can say for adult party guests I hosted back in the squadron days.
Gallons of gas burned: I do not want to know
Fast food eaten: none, unless Chipotle and Panera count. Which they might. Tried to eat at In-N-Out once but the kids wouldn’t let us. True story.