Our Third Anniversary

Today we celebrate our third year of living on the road full time in our motor home.  On our first anniversary we were in the the Niagara region of New York, on our second we were in the Salt Lake City area, and this year we are in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.  Our tally of this year’s travels yielded some very interesting results:
                                                                  Year Three     Year Two     Year One
Motor Home Miles                                           3,769           6,846            8,037
Car Miles                                                       12,021         18,476          17,463
States Visited (Excluding Repeats)                         4                  9                 27
Longest Stay (Weeks)                                          10*                4                 16
     * two stays at same place in Las Vegas of 6 and 4 weeks
We were surprised when we looked at the data.  We had to stop and think about why the motor home and car miles were down so much.  There are a few things that explain it.  First, in addition to our normal wintering of 4+ months where we slow way down on our traveling, we also spent the 10 weeks in Las Vegas.  Especially on the way north, our Las Vegas stay was somewhat out of necessity as we had to wait until the snow was off the roads in Yosemite to move on up north.  We also chose to spend a month on the Oregon coast, an extended stationary period on our northward journey that we haven’t made in the past.  The past two years by the time of our anniversary we already had reached our northernmost point in our year’s journey and were well on our way heading back south.  This year we still have a northerly trek left though Washington State and into southern BC after our anniversary date.  All of these factors also weighed in on our states visited tally which was only 4 this year – Nevada, Arizona, California and Oregon.  As for the car, in the first two years we made two round trips from the Deep South to the Midwest and back.  This year, we were much farther away from the Midwest and flew back for visits.  Our sightseeing miles in the car were about the same as in the prior years even though we mostly parked it while in Vegas and used the city bus for local travel.
But just the same, we had a spectacular year.  First and foremost, was the birth of Natasha and Andy’s first baby and our first grandchild – a big and healthy baby boy.  And there was the milestone 50th wedding anniversary of my parents.  Vegas was a blast and especially Halloween on Fremont Street.  Our self-proclaimed poker pro played a ton of live poker and at least held his own.  We made our first pilgrimage to the Mecca of wintertime RVing in the desert – Quartzsite, Arizona.   We visited Yuma, Tucson, and Phoenix.  After a Spring stint in Vegas, we toured Death Valley, Yosemite, Reno-Tahoe- Carson City, Lassen Volcanic Park, and Mount Shasta.  We are spending our tenth week in Oregon including Crater Lake, the Rogue River Valley, the giant Redwoods back in very northern costal California, and traveled about 300 miles of the Pacific Coast of Oregon.  We are finishing our stay in the Willamette Valley a region of amazing agricultural riches near Portland, the Columbia River Gorge, and Mount Hood.  We have now been in Oregon long enough that they named a bridge for us.
And we can’t close this post without a mention of our Alley Cat.  She was so thrilled about the anniversary that she wanted to go out for a walk.  Well, at least she walked for a little while.