There is a lot to process when we are traveling. We’re on the road for extended periods of time and visit so many places that it’s difficult for us to recall all the details when we return home. That’s one of the reasons we started this journal. We want to hold on to our travel memories and not let them fade away.

This post is focused on last year’s travel season statistics. While this post is mostly for (future) us, we hope you find something of interest.

Where we stayed

We were away from home for 120 nights in 2025 and this required making 53 individual camping reservations. We camped in 15 States, three Provinces and took our RV on its very first ferry ride from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor, ME.

The chart below summarizes the type of camping facility and number of days we stayed in each. Family stays were with Joe’s mother. National Parks include those both in the US and Canada. We separated private campgrounds from those in National/State/Provincial Parks.

While it’s clear that we love to stay in campgrounds and Harvest Hosts, we get free meals when we stay with Joe’s Mom 😉.

Fuel consumption and cost

Miles Traveled	9,943
Gallons of fuel	636
Average MPG	15.63
Highest cost per gallon	$4.52
Lowest cost per gallon	$3.21
Average fuel cost	$3.81
Median Fuel Cost	$3.80
Total Fuel Cost	$2,485.03
Number of fuel fill ups	41
Average Days between fill ups	2.92

We traveled fewer miles than in previous years because we spent 40% of our travel time in maritime region of Canada where distances between destinations are relatively short. A long travel day was 180 miles and most travel days were under 80 miles per day. That’s one under-appreciated fact about traveling in the maritime provinces of Canada. Everything is close and one can spend more time enjoying local sites and less time traveling to them.

Problems along the way

We experienced a number of problems while traveling. A stone cracked our windshield while in Halifax, NS. Getting that fixed and keeping to our travel schedule was challenging. We discovered a cracked sewer hose (fortunately before Joe opened the black tank valve!) while in Nova Scotia and learned the importance of carrying spare parts when traveling outside the US, or in rural areas. We temporarily became Canadian Amazon Prime members just so we could get a replacement hose shipped to us in a few days. If we had ordered a replacement hose using our US Amazon account it would have taken 10+ days.

We also experienced an electrical power problem while in Maine last July that we didn’t get fixed until we reached the Pleasure-Way Rally in Branson, MO in October. The problem was due to a loose connection on the battery monitor shunt. Thank you, Ryan, for the repair!

What we learned

One paradigm Joe thought he learned while working is to know what metrics you want before you start collecting data. Putting this short summary together made it apparent that we could do a much better job at collecting better and more insightful data.

Below is a page of the spreadsheet that we use to track our trip. After doing this summary, we immediately see ways to improve it. For example, historically we tracked both miles and travel time in the same cell. Obviously, that data would be much more useful if separated into different cells. One other obvious data point we didn’t collect was how much the campgrounds cost. We plan to do this for the 2026 travel season.

We have gained a lot of experience from our RV travels over the years. Keeping track of when we will have RV services (water, electric and sewer) prevents us from running out of water, or trying to find places to dump our waste. It’s no fun wondering if there is enough room in the black tank to flush the toilet or hearing the grey water gurgling up from the shower drain when doing dishes. (The grey water back up actually happened to us on our first trip in an RV. We rented an RV in mid 2020. Sue wanted to make sure our marriage would survive living in such small quarters. We were smitten with the RV camping experience and purchased our first RV, an Ontour 2.2 shortly after.)

It’s also important for us to keep track of where we will have access to laundry facilities and make sure we stay in that location long enough to wash our clothes. We only pack a finite supply of underwear and during one short trip, Joe forgot to pack any but that’s a story for another time!

In 2025, we camped for the first time in New Hampshire, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Since 2020, we have spent at least one night in our RV in 43 states and 4 provinces. (Come to think of it, it might be interesting to keep track of the number of nights spent in each State or Province.) We expect to add Florida, Nevada, Kansas and Saskatchewan to our travel map this summer.

We would love to hear from you with suggestions on how to better track our travel data or what other travel info would be of interest. Please leave a comment below.

The Philadelphia region was blessed with a couple of warm days with temperatures in the 70’s. This gave us the opportunity to wash the exterior of our motorhome in relative comfort. By the time this is posted we will be 16 days from traveling to Florida.

Thanks for checking in.