Map of Our 2015 Travels

We often get asked the question, "Where have you been since you started your full-time travels?" We try to answer in words, but we think a picture is easier to understand. So Mark has been looking to find the best way to picture our routes. His favorite method is interfacing the spread sheet of our campground locations with My Maps in Google. He keeps a pretty detailed spread sheet of all the places we stay, including our site number, cost, amenities, town, state, etc. He uses the location fields to plot our route. This map includes our travels since our retirement from Weatherford, Oklahoma, in January 2015, until we returned to Oklahoma in May 2015 for our son's graduation from medical school. So this pictures our route covering our first 4 months on the road. Each lettered stop is one or more nights spent at that location.

That first loop included a bee-line to the tip of Texas to look for warm weather in January. It was delayed a little for a root canal in San Antonio. After a month's stay in Mission, Texas, we headed to the Hill Country to take our written and driving tests to get our new Texas driver's licenses. Next, we visited Big Bend National Park as we headed west. We had an appointment to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and back up to the top) in April. We wandered back towards the west along I-40 to get back to Oklahoma for some family time in May.

After spending several weeks in Oklahoma and helping our son and daughter-in-law move to Kansas City, we started a second loop in June, 2015. Mark developed another map for this second journey of the year. We spent the rest of the summer in Colorado, usually at altitudes over 8,000 feet. It was the coolest summer of our lives in more way than one. We hiked in the mountains every day, and we never wore shorts the entire summer because it was too cold! We waited for the autumn to head into Utah, and loved visiting the wonderful national parks there. We finished the loop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the balloon festival in October. Then it was back to Oklahoma because we had a plane to catch!

Mark didn't try to map our next journey, as we flew to South Korea to visit our nephew and his family living there. We were gone for almost a month, as we also visited Japan. But we were back in the United States in time for Thanksgiving. After an icy holiday in Oklahoma, we drove the motor home to sunny south Texas for the rest of 2015. We returned via car to spend the Christmas holidays with family in Oklahoma--completing the first year of our full-time travels.

Forgive all the words, but we hope this map illustrates a summary of our first year on the road. Mark is working on the 2016 map of our current travels, that we will put on the blog at the end of this year. Until then, we will continue our journey--wandering His wonders.