Hello again!
Sadly, we are winding down our road trip and will be heading home soon. At the end of a vacation many people say it’s good to be home. We are not those people. While this is a vacation and not exactly what life will be like once we are able to travel full time, it does offer a small glimpse into the future for us.
We have had many great experiences over the last couple of weeks. We have seen an amazing amount of wildlife. We have fished several lakes, streams and rivers. We have hiked on trails and driven our Jeep on others. We have also spent valuable time with family, most importantly with our son.
As we draw closer to our final day, we can already feel the anxiety building at the very thought of returning to work. We try to avoid thinking or saying anything about it, but it always finds a way to come up in conversation. It’s painfully obvious that the life we are currently leading is not the one that makes us happy; yet we are obligated to ride it out and make the best of this period our lives.
A large part of this trip was to try and avoid some of the financial pitfalls of prior vacations. To be honest, I don’t really know how we did at this point. We certainly didn’t eat nearly as much fast food as we did on prior trips. Our souvenir purchases consisted of refrigerator magnets for our RV to memorialize the places we visited. So in that respect we did much better than past vacations.
We did have to visit a few Walmarts to restock our food supply a couple of times. It’s amazing how much food teenage boys eat!! We also had a significant issue with our RV after hitting some very rough road in southern Idaho. That was an unexpected expense to get repairs done, but we did it ourselves and we are damn proud of it too!And it probably saved us a few hundred dollars. I will also admit that I did purchase a new fishing pole after breaking mine in half at Yellowstone Lake, but I only spent $50 whereas in the past I probably would have spent $150.
While not perfect, I feel we made a good conscious effort not to waste money on this trip. I will have to dig into our finances once we get home and see how things officially panned out. It will be interesting as this was our first big trip with our bigger RV. The fuel costs more up front but the diesel engine gets much better fuel mileage and has a bigger tank. It’s also a dream to drive compared to our old gas engine RV. When I get some time, I might do a comparison of costs for this trip to our last two summer trips so I can see if there was any savings or if it’s a wash. Either way, I wouldn’t go back to a gas rig just based on drive and towing ability alone. Those two factors make the costs worth it.
Since we have been out of town for awhile I am severely past due on my June financial update. I will get to work on that as it should be very interesting since the market rebounded nicely from May.
Thank you again for following our blog and I hope everyone enjoyed the photos we posted during our trip. I have many more photos to share once we get home and I can download my camera, including a very close encounter I had with a momma grizzly bear and her two cubs in Yellowstone.
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More to come………………………