9/19/2021 - Sunday
OK, I'm ready to wrap this trip up.
We spent 4 days in Sierra Vista with Mazie, beginning the process of putting David to rest. Mazie was pretty good when we showed up about 11:30 a.m. on September 7th. There is a lot of red tape to deal with when someone passes, even though she had most of it pretty well organized. We did what we could, then decided to head home and unload the RV while we waited for the Death Certificate to come in so we could proceed. It was pretty warm in Sierra Vista, and about 15 degrees hotter in Mesa, so it was a tough decision to leave, put delaying that ordeal did not seem to be of any benefit to us.
We had a really good trip this year, although we got off to a rough start with our incident in Albuquerque, where we narrowly avoided getting involved in the 3-car collision immediately in front of us, and had to limp onto a parking lot with only the emergence brake to stop us. But we got through that, although it delayed us 3 days, but continued on with no major problems thereafter, although we did have a few "fix-its" along the way. That's pretty well just part of RVing.
We traveled through 19 states -- AZ, NM, CO, NE, SD, ND, MN, WI, MI, IN,OH, KY, TN, GA, FL for the first half of the trip. Then we retraced some of that on our way back, trying to avoid the hottest weather. That took us from FL through AL, TN, KY, IN, MI, WI, MN, and SD, where we heard about David's passing and headed straight to Sierra Vista, Arizona -- through NE, KS, OK, TX, NM and AZ. I actually thought we were going to miss Texas this year, in fact we talked about it when we were crossing the corner of Oklahoma on Hwy 54, then Joe saw a mileage sign to Texhoma ahead, and he said, "isn't Texhoma in Texas?" So I got the map back out, and sure enough, we had about 100 miles of Texas to drive. We really liked western SD and ND, and always love the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (they have good rocks!)
We drove 9,137 miles in the RV and 6,763 in the Jeep. We bought a lot of fuel. I didn't keep track of the Jeep fuel, but for the RV we bought 1,427.007 gallons, paid a total of $4,244.83 and averaged 6.26 miles per gallon -- not great, but par for the course. Our fuel for the RV averaged out to $2.9746 per gallon. We had a lot of nights of free camping -- staying at John's, and Mike's in Tennessee, and Mike's in Vincennes, and a few Walmarts (temperature permitting) and casinos, which was good because most camping fees have gotten higher, like everything else. So I didn't total that, or average it out. I'm sure it was too much! We were gone from May 10 to Sept. 11 -- a total of 123 days.
The desert has really greened up with all the monsoon rain we missed out on. And the bugs -- driving on the Arizona freeway -- were awful. We don't normally have many bugs, but all that rain brought out tons of yellow butterflies and other fairly large varmints which continually hit our windshield. I don't know if we will ever get it clean. But our place looked good, our neighbors had taken good care of us. We didn't have any weeds, just a few tree sprouts which happens any time it rains. We didn't see any missing shingles or fallen trees, so that was a relief. It was actually good to be home, even though it was 103 when we pulled in at 1:15, and got up to 108 before the day was over, and for the next couple of days. That wasn't so great.
We are heading back to Sierra Vista this week to finalize the paperwork with Mazie and finish the funeral arrangements for David, so this concludes this year's travel blog. We were very fortunate to have stayed healthy for this whole trip -- no COVID, although we are vaccinated, and started masking up again when the numbers started growing again, so we did what we could to remain healthy.
Thanks to all who followed us -- it was an Excellent Adventure. I welcome any comments.
