Saturday, September 14 - I finally got out the calculator and added up my columns of figures from this year's trip. According to my records, we spent $5,073.27 on fuel for the RV, and we traveled 9,695 miles, which gave us an average cost of $3.70 per gallon. The highest we paid was in Carmi, Illinois, the last night out before our first arrival in Vincennes on April 15, at $3.919. Gas actually went over $4.00 per gallon in Vincennes before we left, but we didn't have to fill up until we got to Princeton, Kentucky, where the price was $3,869 on May 4. I calculated that we bought 1,370.75 gallons of gas, which gave us an overall average of 7.0727 per gallon. Our goal is 7 mpg, so we did make that.
Our second big expense when we travel is lodging costs. We were gone 139 days this year (2 days longer than our Alaska summer), but we had 67 free nights (a combination of 5 weeks in Florida at John and Bridgette's and our two Indiana trips (19 days), with 5 nights at relatives in Tennessee, 2 nights on Walmart parking lots, and one free camping at a casino in Oklahoma. Our total lodging costs were $2,041.67 for 72 paid nights, which averaged $28.35 per night. Overall, our average for the 139 nights was $14.68 so all those free nights helped a lot. The most we paid was in Key West, 3 nights at $63.00 each and that was with a Passport America 50% discount. We stayed in a lot of state parks, which is our first preference, especially since now most of them have electricity and water, and many have sewer, some have cable and laundry facilities, and a few even have Internet.
We bought the MiFi Hot Spot card in April in Indiana, which worked out very well. We no longer had to seek campgrounds with Internet, or spend a half day at McDonald's, getting caught up on the blog. We disconnected our home phone lines are are now strictly cell phones and the Hot Spot at home. So far, we haven't seen any downside of that decision.
We only bought propane twice, both times in Vincennes--$28.12 in May ($2.19/gallon) and $31.31 in July ($2.09 per gallon). I quit keeping track of our other expenses (groceries, eating out, entertainment, dingy fuel, and misc.) so those are all the numbers I have for the whole trip.
An interesting fact on our miles -- we drove from Arizona through Texas (along the Mexican border) and cut over to Corpus Christi, then up through Arkansas and across Missouri to Vincennes, for a total of 2641 miles. When we left Vincennes, we went back to Corpus Christi (through Memphis this time due to flooding of the Midwest and Mississippi River), then across Louisiana (including New Orleans) and the coastline of Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle to get to John and Bridgette's in Ruskin, Florida. That scenic route was 2689 miles -- 48 miles more than our Arizona-Indiana scenic route.
Returning to Vincennes through Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky, was about 1936 miles, and home from Indiana (Bloomington area was our last Indiana fuel stop) was 2005 miles. This route included a week in Ruidoso, New Mexico, but it was about 650 miles less than getting to Indiana the first time. Our side trip from Tampa to the Kennedy Space Center and the 76 miles from Vincennes to our fuel stop outside of Bloomington was the rest of the miles.
The cheapest gas we found was when we got home -- $3.299. We paid $3.39 in South Carolina once. The highest gas was in the Midwest, but gas prices were all over the map during the entire trip. Thank you, Paul, for sending me the gasbuddy.com link -- that helped.
So that concludes the 2011 trip, and I'm going to file away my budget sheets. We don't have any definite plans for the next big trip, but there are lots of places we want to go, so we'll see what the future brings.
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