Day 24 Bob and Kate's Great Adventure-The things I learned on this trip!

 On Day 24, we were only 7 hours from home now and that felt good. We got on the road and made it home by early afternoon, driving through Missouri and Illinois.

The things I have learned on this trip will forever change the way we travel.

1. Travel with someone you get along with. We are great traveling companions. Bob doesn't mind driving and Kate is the great navigator. We like to drive and don't take frequent stops when we are trying to get somewhere.  We enjoy going off the beaten path and seeing where real America lives. We like to have picnics and don't eat out for every meal. We like to listen to the same music. We will stay in a storefront motel for the experience. We take care of each other.

2. Use a vehicle with plenty of room and good gas mileage. Our Honda Odyssey was the perfect vehicle for this trip. We were able to spread out in the back if we needed to and had plenty of room to take the 2-3 seasons of clothes we needed for the trip. Our van got 28 MPG for the whole trip.

3. On the same line as above, fill up before going on long stretches of desolate roads. There were many back roads we took that were miles from any kind of civilization, let alone a gas station.  We were very careful about knowing how much gas we had if the maps showed few towns in our travels.

4. Use Priceline or Trivago only to look at prices. Do not make your reservation with them. Before I called a motel I would look on the App to find out what the lowest price would be. I would call the motel and ask if they had rooms and how much. If they said an amount above what was on the App I would tell them I can get it for less online. They always gave us the cheaper price. Also, I had one place that was much cheaper then app when we walked in and asked for a room.

5. Get a reservation before traveling across desolate countryside, where you may not have service. We traveled from the "4 corners" to the Grand Canyon on a desolate road that had one motel with outrageous prices. We walked in and walked out and moved on west to another motel that was closer to the Grand Canyon. It was still expensive, because of the location, but we were able to get a room for less than the other place and we were closer to our final destination the next morning.

6. Join a motel plan with points and free nights.  We were able to get 3 free nights saved up on this trip with Choice Motels membership. This was a great chain of motels and we were able to find one about 75% of the time on the road. Most of them were clean and had breakfast in the morning. The prices were reasonable and comparable to other motels in the areas.

7. Check your data plan before leaving home. We have unlimited data with our plan, but that does not include roaming data. There is very little Sprint service in the west where we had traveled and used our roaming data within the first 3 days. We shut off our roaming data after that and only used when we were searching for a place to stay.

8. Travel in October or the end of September when going out west. This was the perfect time for weather. Although we did have an extra day before we went into Yellowstone the weather was great and the crowds were minimal. North Dakota was bitter cold but the rest of the trip was perfect weather. Many motels and attractions close on October 1st so make sure you check those.

9. Have a picnic for one meal a day. Take a large cooler with waterproof containers. We stopped at Wal-Marts for lunch meat, bread, salads, fruit, etc. Sometimes we would eat out for lunch and just snack for dinner. This saved us a lot of money. Most of the motels we stayed in had breakfast in the morning.

10. Don't get in a hurry. When we planned this trip, it was suppose to take us 16 days to get to Albuquerque, NM. We decided to leave 19 days early, just in case we ran into difficulties or extra site seeing on the road. Because we had extra days we were able to stay in Cody an extra day because of snow in the mountains and also were able to add a couple places to our trip. We made it to Albuquerque one day early.

Watch our last video of the whole trip:

https://youtu.be/WBCaJaojTY4

Day 23 Bob and Kate's Great Adventure

Day 23 we said our goodbyes to all the great Army buddies we had spent the last 4 days with! Kind of sad we only get to see them every 2 years. We will need to travel the United States more and see where they live.

We ate breakfast and headed East towards home. We drove through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and spent the night in Joplin Missouri. We had spent the night in Joplin many times on our way to Texas so we know the area and it was a good time of night to stop.

Not a very eventful day. Just lots of driving, sleeping, reading, and catching up on sermons from church.