Map of our 2016 Travels

As we complete our second year on the road, it is fun to map exactly where we have wandered during 2016. So Mark developed maps, where each point represents a campground where we stayed. During each of those stays, we explored the area around us in our car. After 3-7 days we would head down the road to another campground a couple hours away. Because we stayed in 72 different campgrounds during the year, there were too many points to fit onto one map. So Mark divided our year's travels into two. The first map represents our travels beginning December 2015 when we left Oklahoma for our month-long stay in the southern tip of Texas. It illustrates our path through the first five months of 2016.

When we left Mission, Texas, we made our way along the Gulf coast to stay warm during the winter months. We had to take a break from the coast to make a trip to Red Bay, Alabama, to replace a broken slide motor. After our repairs were finished, we headed back to the gulf, and spent a good part of the winter at the beach.

Some of our paths look like a confused road trip, as we did some back-tracking in the spring. That's because we had visits from several different groups during 2016. We hosted Denisa's Mother in Savannah in April, then our son Blake in north Georgia in May, then friends Connie and Steven in North Carolina later that month.

The second map shows us heading south for a rendezvous at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in early June. We got to spend a week with both sons and daughter-in-law and family at the beach.

That put us further south during the summer than we had planned, so we headed north for cooler temperatures. We heard over and over that the summer of 2016 was hotter and dryer than usual as we made our way into Tennessee.

We left the motor home in Tennessee for a month while we drove our car back to Oklahoma in late July. We wanted to be there for Mark's Father's 90th birthday celebration, and Denisa went on the annual "girl trip" with her Mother and sisters.

When we returned, we pushed north through West Virginia and Ohio into the Great Lakes area. We stayed close to the lakes as we made our way through upstate New York in anticipation of fall foliage colors in the Adirondacks and another visit from Denisa's Mother. We enjoyed watching the leaves change as we slowly headed south. During another visit from our son Blake, we found the most spectacular trees of autumn in West Virginia.

From that point we were on a bit of a schedule, as we made our way through the length of Tennessee and Arkansas to get to Oklahoma in time for Thanksgiving. We enjoyed a couple weeks in Oklahoma in November, then headed south to warmer weather in December. That's where the motor home is sitting through the end of 2016. As we see the maps of our travels this past year, we are reminded of the great fun we've been blessed with as we wandered the eastern section of this beautiful country. Our journey allowed us to spend several weeks in each of 16 different states. It was a great year!