Day 32 - Home and Stats

Wednesday we woke up to 20F but the Serenity was warm and we did not have any frozen pipes. We had hot water, yay.   

We set off for home but planned a stop to visit my mom in Moriah, NY. We arrived at mom's around 10:30 and spent a couple of hours catching up with her, showing her pictures of our trip, etc. She recalled visiting many of the same places we did with Dad in their motor home. I think she really enjoyed reminiscing. 

We also delivered a photo album that my cousin Valarie put together for mom. It included lots of old pictures of the family. It was very thoughtful of Val and Mom really appreciated the album. 

After mom's we stopped at June's twin sister's house just to say hello. Lucky for us they were just having lunch and were willing to share :-). 

We arrived home about 1:30PM, after 32 days, 5779 miles, 25 states, 3 National Parks, and many friends and relatives visited. 

We were very lucky, other than one night when the batteries went very low (we still don't know why) and one night when the pipes froze, we had no real issues. 

It was a great trip. 

Statistics: I know everyone loves numbers just as much as I do...

Our route:

Our fuel mileage was the worst we have ever recorded. On our 2020 road trip of 4122 miles we averaged 18.2 mpg. On this trip of 5779 miles we averaged 15.8 mpg. That is a big difference.

I attribute this to a combination of things. 

- It seemed we were always headed into a headwind.  I can't recall ever seeing a flag flying in our direction of travel. 

- We brought our RV into the Mercedes dealer for a emissions recall in 2021. They changed a lot of things and although they say it should not impact the mileage, I think it did. It was a class action lawsuit, lots of money was involved and I have read on the web that others have seen an impact to mileage. 

- We are carrying bicycles on the front of our RV which increase drag and disrupt air flow. I suspect this contributes more than the other two but until I take a long trip without the bicycles I will not be able to verify this. 

Diesel fuel prices ranged from $4.10 when I left VT to $5.20 in Florida. The average was $4.84. We picked a fine time to take a road trip, we laid out $1768 in fuel. 

Here is the data.

Our Route took us through 25 States, 6 we had not been to in our RV.

This filled out most of the east side of our RV sticker on the inside of our door. We clearly have lots of the USA left to explore by RV. (We have visited many more states, just not by RV)

I have more stats, but I doubt anyone but me is interested. :-)