Starting Another Road Trip

In just a few days, we embark on another road trip.  As I was thinking about this, I searched for a way to display past road trips.  I have kept a GPS tracker running on most road trips for the past few years for the purpose of geotagging the pictures I take during the trip, but one side-benefit of this is the ability to export all the GPS data and import this data into a map which will display the entire route.

I found a web site (https://gpx.studio/) which will import multiple sets of GPS data and display the routes in different colors, so I plotted the major road trips of the last three years on one map and found the result rather interesting...

Color legend:
Dark Green: Florida - January 2021
Yellow: New Mexico - April 2021
Pink: Florida - January 2022
Cyan: Asheville volunteering trip - April 2022
Blue: Washington/California - October 2022
Red: Florida volunteering trip - January 2023
Light Green: Minnesota - June 2023 (this one added a couple of flights to Washington)

This upcoming trip will fill out some areas to the east, including New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, ending up in North Carolina, and a planned volunteering trip in January 2024 will fill in Texas a little bit more.

So far we’ve put 40,000 miles on the RV in about three years.  Florida has gotten a lot of our business, with three trips.

What’s fun is to zoom in on a particular area and see all the little side trips and running around that is done.  Quite a spider’s web in some areas.

The RV is mostly ready, save for an air conditioning problem where the passenger side runs cold and the driver’s side runs warm.  This one has me baffled and it probably won’t get fixed before we leave.  I just hope the weather is not too hot.  Deb will freeze.  I just filled the propane and topped off the fuel tank today, and we’re busy packing stuff in for six weeks on the road. 

New for this trip:  Up until now, our sleeping arrangements have been a three-inch piece of foam on a piece of plywood. The only place to sleep in this RV is the fold-down dinette booth, which we left folded down all the time.  The seat cushions are rather lumpy so I put plywood on top of them and a piece of foam on top of the plywood.  Instant bed.  Trouble is, foam sleeps hot.

So we went out and bought an honest-to-goodness coil spring mattress.  I removed the dinette seats and the underlying structure, built a platform of plywood, and the mattress sits on top of the plywood.  Some extra space at one end was made into a storage compartment.  It was a bit tricky getting a full-size mattress into that restricted space--it had to be nearly folded in half to get it in there, but it’s there.  It was thicker than I expected, 12-inches is a lot for a small RV, but we’re looking forward to more comfortable sleep.