2023: Our Year In Review

Where did the year go?

Every year, it feels like it was “just” Christmas. You wonder, how did a whole ‘nother year go by so fast? But when you stop to think about what was going on last January, February, or April, suddenly it starts feeling like, wow, a lot of stuff happened over the past twelve months. One year ago this month, we discovered a leak in the roof of our Airstream. That little revelation upended our short term travel plans as we sought out an Airstream dealer that could repair the leak under warranty. Our subsequent trip from California to Airstream of New Mexico in Albuquerque remains one of our most memorable to date, especially because of all the self-inflicted misadventures that occurred along the way. Did that really only happen last year? Feels like three lifetimes ago now. Then, this past summer, we spent more nights in our Airstream than we did in a real house. Over the 91 days that elapsed between June 1st and August 31st, we slept in our Airstream 63 nights. We love traveling and we love our Airstream, but the cabin fever was definitely starting to nip at our heels. In September, on the way back home to Texas, we had the Airstream’s rear axel swapped out under warranty because of uneven tire wear we had discovered at the beginning of the summer. Some two weeks after we arrived home, a monster hail storm assaulted our neighborhood, ruining the roof on our house, cracking the windshield of Jill’s VW Eos, denting the body of both her car and my truck, and—most tragically of all—totaling our Airstream. Consequently, just last month, we went through the process of getting ourselves a brand new 2024 Airstream Flying Cloud Office.

And those are only the biggest things that come to mind from the past year! What a wild ride.

2023 Stats

• We spent 104 nights in the Airstream. So a little less than a third of our year was spent on the road.
• We stayed at 22 RV parks and Harvest Hosts locations across 20 different cities and 5 states.
• We paid a total of $2,602.85 in RV park fees, for an average of $25.03 per night. Note that we own a plot of land in northern New Mexico where we spend a lot of time. We don’t pay any nightly fees when staying there, which drives our average cost down quite a bit. If you subtract the 46 nights we spent there, our average goes up to $44.88.
• We encountered 1 catastrophic hailstorm, yielding 2 different Airstreams owned over the course of the year. Although we’re pretty stoked about the new one, we REALLY hope this one lasts a LOT longer than the first one, which was only 19 months old when it was mercilessly beaten to death.
• I wish we had tracked our mileage for the year, but we only have absolute totals since we started RV’ing. Starting in 2024, we’re going to track our annual mileage more closely.
  • Our 2022 Ram 2500 now has 31,917 miles on it. We picked it up in December 2021, so that comes to about 16,000 miles per year.
  • Our 2022 Airstream was put out to pasture after only 14,442 miles. Our 2024 Airstream, which we just got in November, has already been towed 2,689 miles.
• Counting this post, we published 22 articles this year which is quite an improvement over 2022 when we only posted 10 articles.

The Year Ahead

When we were getting our new Airstream, a salesman at Airstream of Colorado quipped that “the longer you stay in an RV, the more it shrinks.” Our travels this past year underscored the truth in that maxim. It’s especially pertinent for those of us who work regular full-time jobs while we travel and therefore remain sequestered inside our trailers, glued to laptops, for at least eight or nine hours each and every weekday. It turns out that working from beautifully unique locations, in and of itself, isn’t enough. In order to justify all the inconveniences inherent in RV travel, we need a higher degree of adventure, in addition to the bucolic scenery visible from the windows of our Airstream. We decided that too many of our journeys this past year were too subdued, staying in individual locations for too long, without sufficient exploration or excitement.

For 2024, our RV New Year’s Resolution is “more places with more adventure”. We’ve already made good on this promise with the new Airstream. After buying it from Airstream of Colorado, we stayed in the state several days longer than strictly necessary to complete the transaction. We thoroughly enjoyed the mild wintry weather and all the amenities available at the expansive Jellystone RV park in Larkspur. On the way home, we baked in a two-night stay at the beautiful Palo Duro Canyon State Park where we hiked and explored, free from the intense crowds that peak-season travel inevitably spawns. A few weeks later when we headed to California to spend the holidays with family, we took our time. We stopped for a night at a fantastic, new-to-us KOA in Tucson and enjoyed dinner with Jill’s family who winters in the same city. From there we proceeded to a state park in Cottonwood, Arizona where we camped and worked for a week before making the final trek to Southern California on Christmas Eve. The weather in Cottonwood was perfect. Light winds, brilliant blue skies, and temperatures that peaked in the low 60’s. We hiked, ran, walked, cooked outside, and had campfires almost every night. One afternoon we drove the 30 minutes to Sedona, had an amazing lunch at a place called the Hideaway House, and explored the area for the afternoon. We could have just raced straight across the country, shackled to the austere I-10 freeway like a helpless railroad car for three consecutive days, arriving in California a full week earlier, but we opted against it. That juice, we decided, wasn’t worth the squeeze. Instead, we made an adventure out of it and felt rejuvenated by the experience. We didn’t buy an RV just to lug it around like a shiny aluminum ornament; we bought it to go places we wouldn’t otherwise go!

So where, exactly, are we planning to go this year? We’re not sure yet. However, there will be at least one long trip throughout Colorado, unburdened by the demands of our day jobs. That’s right! A pure vacation of at least 15 days in our favorite state. It’ll be grand.

Thanks for reading!

We truly appreciate your readership and wish you all the best in the coming year. 🍾

– Nick & Jill