What's Your Annual Rv Usage/mileage? Options

[Jerry S.]

Hi everybody,

To celebrate my one year anniversary on this forum, I thought I'd try a poll. I just hope I did the "poll" part right.

The "Special Price Break" thread from a few weeks ago got me thinking about the effect sky-rocketing fuel prices is having on RV travel. Simplistically, how much these rising fuel costs are increasing the cost of your RVing is primarily a function of your mileage. For example, if you drive the RV 10,000 miles a year and get 10 mpg., fuel at $3 a gallon costs you an extra $1,000 a year over $2 a gallon fuel. While that is a lot of money to some of us, I don't see that as a "deal breaker" for many retired, full-timers on this forum. Another factor is the amount of time you spend RVing. If that 10,000 miles is spread over 5, 6, 7 months or more of travelling, you're getting a pretty good return on the extra $1,000. On the lower end, an extra $500-$1,000 for a 3 week vacation may put a long summer RV trip out of reach for families.

I think it will be interesting to see the poll results (assuming I did that part of this post right) and comments by others on this financial problem facing RVers.

[Jerry S.]

Hi again folks,

As the originator of this poll/thread, I check in "once in a while" with my personal updates concerning RV usage as effected by gas prices. This summer I ended up taking the shortest (mileage-wise) summer trip since I retired in 15 years ago. For all of those years until now, our, on average, our summer trip was 8-10 weeks and 8-10,000 miles. This year is was 9 weeks but less than 4,000 miles. My usually fairly accurate math shows that we saved somewhere around $2,000 in gas costs compared to our usual trip.

When we decided on this mini-mileage trip (IL, IN, OH, MI, WI, MN, WI, and back to IL), gas was pushing toward $4/gal. Fortunately, it did not go up much in July and August as it has in the recent years. Since, gas is now actually going down we may actually use some of that gas cost savings from the summer and have a longer fall trip. Usually we just go down to MS, LA and the gulf coast. This year we are going to head west from Lousiana and go all the way to the Grand Canyon. We already have 4 nights reserved at the RV park at the south rim. It has been about 10 years since we've been to GCNP and this will be our longest stay and the first time not in hot weather. In fact, even though it should be in the 60s while we are there, it can snow in late October at 7,000 feet in northern AZ. Hopefully, the extra 3,000 miles for this fall trip will only cost about $1,000 if most gas is under $3.50 as it was per Gasbuddy last week.

We should be leaving Sunday.