Homeword Bound! And a few reflections

Final vacation dinner in Fairmont, MN!

July 12th, 2024

It's finally time to head home!   We had about 15 hours of driving to get from Custer, SD to Crystal Lake, IL and we decided to split that into two days using the route below:

We decided to overnight in Fairmont, MN, where we had dinner at a really nice restaurant, the Bean Town Grill.  We both had salmon and it was delicious!   We had taken I-90 from Rapid City, and the drive was quite boring - flat grasslands and farmland for miles and miles.   In the morning we started on I-90 again until we arrived back in Crystal Lake.  We spent a lot of time during this drive time reflecting on the trip, and thought we'd share some of our thoughts after spending 29 days on the road.

Some Statistics:

• We drove 6,341 miles over 29 days,
• We budgeted $400/day for the trip, which included everything - lodging, food, restaurants, gas, tours, souvenirs, etc..    How does this breakout?
• Lodging - we averaged $250/day for lodging, more than expected
• Food - we averaged about $65/day for food, including groceries for breakfast, lunch, dinner and eating out at restaurants.
• Gas -  We used ~165 gallons of gasoline which cost $620, or ~10 cents per mile
• Souvenirs: $250 total for the trip
• Tours: $1,000 total for the trip
  



Route of the Hiawatha Fee + Rentals - $206






Rafting Trip - $155





















• As I mentioned, we went over our daily lodging budget.  But we had one superpower in lodging - the wonderful friends who allowed us to stay with them at no cost.  Because of our stays with friends we ended up slightly under our target average budget of $400/day.   We made a few mistakes when booking our lodging that cost us significantly more; more on that in the What We Would Do Different section below.

What we did right:

• Before leaving we decided we wanted to avoid Interstate driving if possible, and instead take more scenic and interesting routes in areas we've not traveled.    That ended up being a great decision, and allowed us to experience landscapes, towns and people we otherwise never would have met.    We will definitely try to avoid Interstates in future trips - it adds time but we think it's worth it. 

Planned Route West (to Oceanside, OR)

Planned Route East (from Oceanside, OR)

Rowena Crest viewpoint
along US-30 in Oregon

Driving along the Pacific Coast on the 101







Concert in Havre, North Dakota

• We had purchased a Rav4 Hybrid before this trip, as our Highlander died, and Cindy was nervous the Rav4 wouldn't be big enough. But it turned out to be plenty big. And a big bonus was the improved gas mileage - we averaged almost 40 miles per gallon with the hybrid, saving us a lot on gas money.



The Rav4, neatly organized!

• I changed our photography setup for this trip.   This is the first trip I didn't take my digital SLR camera and all of the accessories, and instead relied on my iPhone 15 Pro and an Atumtek selfie stick my friend Randy Helm turned me onto.   I also brought my GoPro Hero 8 and my DJI Drone.    The iPhone worked great, and is so convenient - I ended up taking over 2,000 pictures, mostly in RAW format, on this trip.   I do plan to get a few photos enlarged, we'll see how those turn out.  The GoPro with the Chesty Mount was essential to capture the white water rafting trip.   I ended up not using the drone, as they are not allowed in national parks and in most state parks.     
• We brought an electric cooler with us and two lithium batteries to power the cooler.   The batteries charged while we drove and could power the cooler overnight or even for a whole day while we stayed at hotels.  This allowed us to make our own breakfasts and lunches every day, which we believe was more healthy and saved us some money.

What we would do different:

• There was a lot of planning involved in this trip.    Here's the itinerary if you are interested.   Once we agreed on dates and found AirBnBs and hotels we booked them.   But we realize now we could have saved at least $1,000 on lodging if we had been a bit more diligent in booking:
• The Steamboat condo we rented through AirBnB was the most expensive.   We discovered later that since there are many condos in Steamboat springs, many owners rent directly on sites like this.    We could have saved more than $100/night by renting a similar unit directly from the owner.   Likewise, the Bungalow in Custer was part of a complex that had its own website and we could have saved $150 renting directly.    In the future we will always see if there is an option to rent directly instead of using AirBnB or Vrbo.
  
  
  

  

  We could have stayed here in Steamboat,
  close to the ski area, for $100 less per night!

  
  
• Since the trip dates were always moving a day or two back and forth for a while, we paid extra for the hotels we booked to have fully refundable cancellation.   This added a few hundred dollars to the cost of our hotels.   But we saw that most of the hotels we booked were not full on the nights we stayed and we could have booked them much closer to our arrival date and not needed to pay for the cancellation option.  The exception to this was the hotel in Dickinson, ND - there were not many hotel facilities in the area and the hotel was fully booked when we stayed.   In the future we'll do some more investigation and wait to book those that are in areas with lots of hotel properties until two days before our stay and book the lower non-refundable price.    For hotels in high demand we will continue to book them early and pay the extra cancellation fee.

  

  Next time we will try to always book "non-refundable"

  
  
  
• One of our goals for this trip was to make the journey just as important as the destination.  While we did a good job of going unique routes and seeing unique landscapes, we didn't do as well at spontaneously stopping  and seeing things along the way.   There were definitely days when we wish we had more time to stop along the way.   It's all a balance  - taking more time would have extended the length of the trip, and 3-4 weeks is about as long as we want to take for a vacation.   But next time we will try to be more purposeful about this.
• We need to build in regular down days, at least one per week.   The original itinerary had a down day every week, but as we started adding more things the first two down days were taken up by activities.  That was a mistake, and we need to keep that in mind in the future.

Issues we didn't expect:

• Because we weren't on the interstates, we had virtually no cell service when we weren't in the hotel or AirBnB.  I have AT&T and Cindy has Mint (T-Mobile/Sprint), and neither of us had reliable service at any time while driving.   There is no way I could have worked on travel days - we couldn't even call the kids because our calls would constantly drop.   Leslie and Paul use something called TravlFi and have had good luck with that, we will try that on our next trip.

AT&T Coverage - light blue is 1 bar, note all the white areas with no service.

• Timezones, timezones, timezones!   Why are they so random and complicated?   If you look at the map below, small portions of North Dakota and South Dakota are in different time zones.   In fact, the northern unit for Teddy Roosevelt National Park is in a different timezone than the southern unit!   Our phones notified us during hikes that we were changing timezones multiple times.   When we did the Route of the Hiawatha (northern Idaho), the actual bike route was in the Mountain Time Zone, but the concessionaire that runs the bike rentals is 10 minutes northwest, in the Pacific Time Zone.   So we arrived at the route at 9 am Mountain Time, only to realize we were actually an hour early- since the concessionaire is on Pacific Time, they determined the bike path (which is in the Mountain Time Zone) will recognize the Pacific Time Zone.   It seemed way over-complicated!
  

• We enjoyed our AirBnBs, but we experienced something we never have before this trip - one of our AirBnB hosts filed a request for reimbursement from us, claiming we had ruined a set of towels.   I didn't even know such a thing existed.    This happened after our stay at Steamboat Springs (our most expensive AirBnB),    Evidently they found blood on some towels, and since it was a high-end AirBnB these were expensive Brooklinen towels.   They wanted $103.50 to cover the cost of the towels.  They sent pictures of the towels and links to the cost of replacement towels.   
  
  
  
  
  We weren't sure how blood got on the towels - if you remember, Cindy had cut her fingers cutting vegetables a couple days before, and she was regularly changing the bandages, so perhaps that is what caused it.   We honestly have no idea.  We are super careful at our AirBnBs, but the owner gave us a negative review because of this, which really soured our experience at that AirBnB.  We will probably stay away from "luxury AirBnBs" in the future.

 So what's next?     Our plan is a 3 week trip to the Northeast, including Acadia and other spots in an area of the country we’ve never visited.   Until then, thanks for reading our blog and following this adventure!