We are wrapping up our seventh year of full-time travel, and 2021 has been a big year for us! We've celebrated some big birthdays and a big wedding anniversary this year, and we've been to some big places!
It's always fun for us to see our travels visually on a map. Every year, Mark maps all of our camping spots and connects the dots to show the route our motor home was driven.
He includes the name and location of each one of those camping sites, and you can see it in the following list.
The travel year started in Oklahoma, where we had just finished up some good holiday family time. In January we headed south, staying in as many Texas State Parks as possible, until we made it to the very southern tip of the state. We then spent a couple months enjoying the activities of resort life, in the same park that Denisa's mother has enjoyed for the last 36 winters. In March, we started the long drive north, again checking out more state parks. Even though we've been to this big state many times, we would see 15 different state parks--many that we had never visited before--in Texas in 2021.
We then wandered through Oklahoma and Arkansas, celebrating big birthdays. We first celebrated Mark's 60th birthday, and then our granddaughter's 3rd birthday. We had a little time on our hands between a birthday party and a wedding that we wanted to attend. So we decided to take a little vacation from our motor home. We used the free flight dollars we earned last year to fly to Alaska for three weeks. First we rented a camper van, where we found it was so much fun to find one beautiful free camping spot after another.
After a week, we were joined by friends and rented a Class C motor home for another seven days. We had more great adventures and beautiful camping spots in our second rental. We experienced some of our trip highlights while floating on the water. We really enjoyed our whale watching cruise, and our kayak trip among the ice bergs that were as big as houses.
We flew back to the lower 48 states, and then started our journey north and west for the summer. We were pleasantly surprised to discover the beautiful Snowy Mountain Range in Wyoming. We think that this no-hook-up campground in those mountains might be the prettiest camp site of all the seven years we have been traveling.
We traveled across the state of Idaho and across Oregon, where we began to see rising diesel prices and campground rates. Each fill-up seemed to break another high cost record this summer! We chose one of our favorite places to celebrate this year's big wedding anniversary. We were on the Oregon coast to celebrate 40 years of marital bliss.
We dodged wildfire smoke for most of the summer. The coast was one of the best places to avoid the smoke because the sea winds blow it away. So we continued down the coast, enjoying the clear skies and the blissfully cool summer temperatures. That's when we had our big break-down of 2021. After spending three days waiting for a tow truck, we had to spend more time at a diesel repair place to get a new air-conditioner compressor. 
To make up for lost time, we sped our travels up across California, because we were meeting special guests. Our oldest son and his family flew in to meet us in Lake Tahoe. We were blessed with a couple clear days to explore this beautiful area, but we also experienced the worst air quality in the country before we left.
We took a drive across Nevada on the "loneliest road in America" that ended at the Great Basin National Park. Then we sped onwards across Utah and two more national parks. We sped up as we traveled through Colorado and Kansas. That's because we had another opportunity for a unique travel experience. Our nephew and his family invited us to spend time with them in Canada's northeast province--Newfoundland. We had a great couple of weeks exploring the beautiful scenery of this island with some of our favorite people. It was here that Denisa celebrated her big 60th birthday.
Since then we've spent family time in the Midwest. We've celebrated our grandson's first birthday, and helped as Denisa's Mother recovered from Covid, and our son had foot surgery. We've been blessed to celebrate both Thanksgiving and Christmas surrounded by people that we love.
Besides the camp site map, Mark also did one more map that shows all of our travels for 2021. It includes those two airplane trips, as we traveled north and west to Alaska and north and east to Newfoundland. Between all of our 2021 travels, we went from the southern tip of Texas to the northern reaches of Alaska; and from the west coast of Oregon to the most easterly point in Canada.
The year in numbers:
We parked in 62 different camping spots.
Our average nightly camping fee was $11.39 (includes free nights boondocking or staying with family and friends).
Our average paid nightly camping fee was $23.22
We visited 12 different states, and one Canadian province this year.
We spent $2,470 on 760 gallons of diesel (at an average price of $3.32 per gallon) for the motor home. That's a low price of $2.179 per gallon in January in Texas to $4.399 in California in August. That $4.399 is the most we've ever paid for diesel in the United States.
We spent $48 on 17 gallons of DEF for the motor home.
We don't even try to keep up with the amount of gasoline we use in the pickup, as we use it to explore while we are camped. But we know that the miles we get per gallon has gone way down since we replaced our little car with a 4x4 pickup last year.
We finished our year with the motor home parked in Beaver, Oklahoma, as we spent time with family during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season. We feel blessed to have spent our seventh year wandering God's wonders. We celebrated some big birthdays and a big anniversary, and many more wonderfully big days in between.
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