Wrapping It All Up

Here I'll give some general last impressions of our trip, our equipment, and our "spiritual journey".

Hopefully, something intelligent for you to digest here

The Trip - The trip was a long time in planning. As I said in one of the earliest posts, we started thinking about a long trip a few years ago. We bought the minivan with this kind of travel in mind three years ago. I made the bed for the Rig a couple of years ago. We started planning this actual trip back last Fall, and we spent a lot of January honing the details, making reservations, etc. 

We had a great time, though maybe you can tell that in the last week or so we were getting tired. We had originally planned to go all the way to the Pacific coast after Yellowstone, visiting Seattle, Vancouver Island, the city of Vancouver, and then driving through British Columbia to Banff. This would have added over 1000 miles and over a week to the trip. We wisely decided some months ago to pare it back. We'll do the Pacific Northwest in a separate trip and fly out and rent a car for that.

So, in terms of length, both in miles and days, the trip was about the limit. We might have benefitted from salting a few more rest days (from driving) into the mix, and taking a different, slightly shorter route back from Calgary. But we were mentally prepared for a long journey. As Vicky said to me, it's a once in a lifetime thing, so let's do it up. Oh, we'll travel again, take long trips again, and use the Rig again, but all not in the same way we did this trip.

As for the places we visited, all are memorable in some way. In particular, we'd recommend to others the Badlands, the Black Hills, and Yellowstone. We spent about the right amount of time in the Badlands. We'd have wanted to spend another day or so in Yellowstone if the north part of the park had been open. In the Black Hills, you can take in Rushmore in a few hours and Devil's Tower in less time, but we wish we'd spent more time at the Crazy Horse Monument. The museum is really interesting. The rest of the Black Hills would be a wonderful place to spend a week's vacation in a cabin in the mountains. Glacier would have been better in a drier year. Banff was stunning from what we could see, but again, would have been better in a drier year. And I recommend going there with a little more planning than we put in to that part of the trip. The most visited spots require you to get bus reservations early. 

The keystone of the trip was the Calgary Stampede. Our departure date was set by planning which days we wanted to be there, and then working backwards to get in all the destinations we wanted to hit on the way out. The Stampede lasts for ten days. We're not rodeo buffs, so we spent exactly the right amount of time there. Four days is plenty. One day to get the lay of the land. You must see the parade, which kicks the whole thing off. You must see one of the evening shows with the chuck wagon races and the music and fireworks spectacular. They have that every day, so we chose to do that the day of the parade. You should go to one of the rodeo sessions, which happen every day. And if you're inclined, go to one of the music shows. Some are free. We chose the big one (not free). In any case, they are going to get you in food, drinks, and souvenirs. 

We enjoyed our visit to Canada. I'm from Buffalo and used to go to Fort Erie, Ontario frequently. When I was a kid, we'd occasionally go to Toronto. We also took family trips to Montreal (Expo 67), Quebec city, and the Maritimes. We even took the ferry to Prince Edward Island (there was no bridge to it then). Vicky is from southern Ontario and summered in Fort Erie after her family relocated to the Buffalo area when she was young. But neither of us have spent nearly as much time in Canada as we did on this trip in at least 50 years. Canada is beautiful, and friendly. But nowadays it's more expensive than it used to be, and it seems a bit more foreign, even to Vicky. I almost expected to see my Canadian bride kiss the ground of the good ol' USA in the Meijer parking lot in Michigan when we finally got back!

There were multiple ways we could have come back, all of them through vast stretches of not much to see. We didn't take the worst way back, but we probably took one of the longest. We wanted to see Lake Superior and the Lake Michigan shore. We maybe could have added a day or so to decrease length of some of the drives. But at that point on a long trip you start to want to get home. As I mentioned in an early post, my family went on a long trip out to California in 1969. We took the northerly route back, through northern Wyoming, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois,... I don't remember a thing after the Badlands. I think we did that last 1400 miles in zombie mode in just a few days.

The Rig - Did it work? Yes. Will we use it again? Yes. Would I recommend traveling this way? Yes. But here are the caveats: 

The bed was great. I'd recommend the mattress we bought, with the addition of a little more foam cut to size. The bed was more comfortable than almost all the beds we slept in on our trip. And in terms of security from bears and other animals at night, we never worried. Way better than a tent. But, in terms of sleeping comfort, we were lucky in some ways. The northern US and southern Canada are generally cooler and dryer at night than central PA during the summer. We were fine even when it got down into the low 40s and even the 30s at night. But it could have been hotter at more of our stops. We only felt mildly uncomfortable on two nights. It could have been five or ten. We're all so used to indoor air conditioning! We had screened windows and a pretty nice fan. That's good if the nighttime temperature is below 65 and the air is not too thick. So the Rig's bedding is good for trips to cool places, or trips in the Spring or Fall.

As for our other gear, we learned a few more things as we went. The cooler was fine for our needs. The Coleman propane stove is a real champ, though it could use a better flame control at low heat levels. The Coleman screen canopy is great for keeping the bugs away when you're sitting around the campsite. You need to buy a tarp to keep rain completely out. 

Enjoying an evening campfire

We rearranged the gear in the boxes that we stowed to make it more efficient in terms of getting at the stuff we used most often. But, we brought a bit too much other stuff, and would have had a bit more room for souvenirs if we'd packed a little less gear. That would also have made getting at things a little easier. The biggest drawback to our comfort was the difficulty in some places in washing dishes. Probably half the places we stayed do not have dishwashing stations with hot water. We had provisions for that, and could always heat water. It just increased the hassle and time involved in making meals. The only other drawback was no bathroom in the vehicle.

Would we have been better off with a different set-up? Say a pop-up trailer? Mobile home? RV? Yes, but...no. As I said in the post describing the Rig, all of the other choices had drawbacks, and would have been much more expensive, both to buy and to operate, than what we had.

We got a chance to witness RV life, since most of the places we stayed were geared toward RV camping. Motor homes and large towed vehicles are obviously very popular, but they're not for us. They are expensive to buy, cumbersome to travel with (we couldn't have stayed at the AirBnB we had in Calgary unless we found somewhere else to park a big RV), and expensive to operate. They can cost many tens of thousands of dollars to buy. They're no fun to pull around. All the conveniences come with equally many inconveniences. And have you seen the price of gas, especially in Canada? We got 23 mpg with the Rig, and so spent around $1500 on gas for the trip. A lot of the mobile homes get less than 10, more than doubling our cost. And a diesel truck pulling a behemoth? Fuggetaboutit!

We plan to take the Rig out again. We're scoping out some shorter trips, in cooler months. The Catskills. The Smokys. The Canadian Maritimes. Others. We'll mix in stays at campgrounds with stops at AirBnBs and hotels. We'll take our time a little more. And take what we've learned about how best to use our road accommodations. But we'll have a lot of freedom to go where we please in our minivan.

The Spiritual Journey - One of the comments Vicky got from friends where she works was along the lines of "We really enjoyed the blog. You guys did so much! But I could never travel with my husband for a month like that! We'd drive each other crazy!" Vicky and I have been married 40 years this year, so we've already driven each other crazy plenty of times. And we got ourselves in the right mindset before the trip. So, there really wasn't much friction during the trip. We've always liked spending time with each other. We travel, go out, converse, or just hang out. And now that we're back, we can go back to our routine of retiring to our own little individual projects whenever we feel like it. 

We accomplished a really big thing that we'd spent months planning. And we had a lot of fun. Sure, we had to adapt, but it was all a good exercise in keeping our relationship strong. Vicky accomplished a really big thing of her own. She's always been terrified of driving. I taught her to drive when she was 26, and that may have traumatized her. But she was determined to do her share of the driving. And outside of me driving through the high winds we experienced in South Dakota, and some driving on the more congested roads around big cities, Vicky definitely did her share. We're tired, but we're not scared off of doing it again. We'll be back on the road again. We'll keep you posted.

Safe travels!

One Last Thing - Vicky and I amuse ourselves on trips by collecting license plates. We check off each state and province as we go and see how many we get. We usually get between 30 and 40 states and several provinces even on relatively short trips. We decided to count plates for the whole trip. States that are hard to get going west of us are usually Vermont, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. We only saw one Vermont plate on the whole trip. I figured the hardest state to get would be Hawaii, but we got that in the Badlands, early in the trip. I figured Alaska wouldn't be that hard. We saw a couple of them in Alberta, and one as we got closer to home in Ohio. By the end of the trip we'd gotten all the Canadian provinces between British Columbia and Quebec, none of the eastern Maritimes, and none of the northern territories. And we got every US state but one: Louisiana. Heading east through Canada, we were getting desperate, and thought we'd count Nova Scotia as a Louisiana plate if we ever saw it because that's where the Cajuns came from. (But we never bagged Nova Scotia, either.) The day after we got back from our trip, in a parking lot in State College, there it was: a Louisiana plate.

The second largest and second smallest states in the Union, parked side by side in Michigan