Our 2019 Travel Map and Summary

Every year Mark makes a map that outlines where we have traveled in the last twelve months. 2019 was a year we'll never forget, as we made our first loop over the Canadian border. It was a great time to travel to Canada with an exchange rate in our favor. Most of the time we only paid 75 cents to the Canadian dollar! We dusted off our math skills as we learned to translate liters to gallons, kilometers to miles, and Canadian dollars to U.S. dollars. This year we added one more national park to our long list of U.S. parks visited. We also started a new list of Canadian national parks, checking off seven different parks over the border this summer. We loved sitting in those red national park chairs that pointed towards some beautiful views!

It's always interesting to see a picture of the path we took over the last twelve months. The following map includes points that represent stops of at least one night. The list on the right includes the name of each campground. Clicking on the picture below will make it easier to read.

We had been looking forward to this trip through the Canadian Rockies, and we did more pre-planning than usual. We made reservations for all of our Canadian summer stops, and we were glad that we did. The national parks in Canada were very crowded, and it wouldn't have been any fun trying to find places to camp on the fly. Four years of experience helped us to guess how long we would like to stay at each spot, and we have to say that we did a pretty good job making reservations and plotting a comfortable speed of moving about Canada. We would definitely recommend reservations to anyone making a similar journey during those popular summer months.

We added only one new state (North Dakota) and two new Canadian provinces (Alberta and British Columbia) to our list of places visited in the motor home in the last five years. It's hard to believe that we have now been traveling full-time for five full years!

Five years must be the average life-expectancy for water pumps and electrical gadgets. Even though we have been blessed with great adventures, we had a run of bad luck this summer. For the first time in five years, the motor home had to be towed when the motor shut down on the side of the highway in South Dakota. A week later we were on the side of the road with a blow out on the car, and ended up buying four new tires. We had to replace our tire monitor, and our cell phone booster this summer. Then the electrical transfer switch went out, leaving us without power inside the motor home. All of those things happened within a three-week time period. It was an expensive summer of replacing things!

Our year by the numbers:
We parked at 59 different camping spots.
Our average nightly camping fee is $11.29 (includes free nights boondocking or staying with family and friends).
Our average paid nightly camping fee is $18.08.
We visited eleven different states this year.
We spent $2,583.10 on 890 gallons of diesel (at an average price of $3.03 per gallon) for the motor home.
We spent $72.91 on 25 gallons of DEF for the motor home.
We don't even try to keep up with the amount of gasoline we purchased for the car, as we use it to explore while we are camped. But we can tell that its odometer turned over 100,000 miles on January 1, 2020.

2019 was another great year of wandering God's wonders through some of the most beautiful landscapes we have ever seen. We are blessed!