2022 by the numbers

We keep various records of our travels during the year - it is interesting to look back on the previous year as we welcome a new one...

We reset the Trip A counter on the Garmin on 1/1/2022, so 9309.5 miles is what it thinks Gracie traveled in 2022.

In a similar way, on the Jeep, the Garmin indicates that we traveled 7189 miles in 2022.

For comparison, looking back two years, 2021 had 76 stops. One of Carl's cousins said that the 2021 outline looked like a moose, and challenged us to make an outline of a bear or an armadillo in 2022 -- I told her it may be a Picasso representation of a bear or armadillo... but I'm not sure we did either one... 

We'll have to check with Jenice on her opinion of whether we achieved any animal outline in 2022 -- I'm thinking a smiling shark swimming west!

Of course, I have to keep spreadsheets -- here are a couple of captures from the rollup page:

Our "Other charges" are high for 2022 for a few reasons: we transferred Peggy's Thousand Trails (TT) Platinum membership into our names and got Trails Collection (costs allocated in December 2021 but reflected in 2022 "other charges"), we upgraded the new-to-us TT membership to Elite in May (1/3 of that cost is listed in December 2021 also - we decided to "write off" the cost over 3 years), and Venture Out (the resort where we own a lot in Mesa) had a large maintenance project that required a special assessment which doubled our M&O fees for the year. On the plus side, we were able to get Venture Out (VO) rental program to rent out our lot for several months in the winter of 21-22 and again 22-23, which we are counting against the M&O and the special assessment (thus the negative amounts for a couple of months).

The "per night for month" column just looks at campground fees - you can see it varies a lot by where we are staying for that month.

In the past, our overall goal has been to average $15 or less per night. However, with the costs of campgrounds significantly increasing over the past 2 years, we've decided to make our goal to stay under $25/night on average.

We have a few memberships that go into the equation: Thousand Trails (TT), Trails Collection (TC), Harvest Hosts (HH), Good Sam, Passport America (PA), Golden Age, and RPI. 

The Harvest Hosts calculation could include the amounts that we spend patronizing the host but since we get goods or services for that amount, I don't include it. 

This year I added a calculation for the number of nights spent in Service Centers - I calculate the cost of camping as "free" but we know that there are significant expenses involved with staying at service centers - we keep those in a separate part of our budget allocation for RV maintenance and upkeep.

We don't have membership fees for Good Sam or Passport America because Carl has a lifetime membership with both of those. Golden Age is the 1/2 price camping that we get a public "national" campgrounds - National parks, Corps of Engineers (COE), National Forest or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Campgrounds -- due to Carl having a Golden Age card (62+ get 1/2 price camping and free entry fees). 

We got RPI for free for a year due to upgrading to Elite with TT. We only stayed at one RPI campground (Hart Ranch in South Dakota in August) - which we really liked - but from what we've read, Hart Ranch may be an anomaly in the RPI system as far as quality is concerned, so we're undecided on whether we will keep that membership for next year. As I understand it, we won't have to make the decision to pay for that at the date the free year runs out (I think in May)... we can elect to get it later when/if we see a need during the year (e.g. there is an RPI campground in the area where we want to stay and it has good reviews). RPI is a yearly membership fee + camping fee program - you pay a one year fee (I think it is $169/year) and then you pay per night for the campsite - $10/night -- and for some campgrounds you additionally pay a resort fee, like $5-15/night. So our campsite at Hart Ranch was $22/night, really a great deal for the quality of the campground there.

Probably more information than most of our readers have interest in, but... I'm in the process of putting our 2023 files together, and closing out 2022, so I thought I'd share!