Southern Charms: Some Numbers

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I collected some numbers about our trip - there is nothing like a number to give you confidence that you know what you are talking about.

84 - Total number of Days on the Road, exactly 12 weeks.

9211 - That's the total number of miles driven from the time we left our driveway to the time we got back to it. I estimated 7000 before we started, but it turned out a lot more than that. I guess we did more driving around towns and to and from campsites. Hard to know exactly how much of that was pulling the trailer, but I'm estimating we put about 5000 miles on the trailer tires!

11.0 - that's my overall mpg on the Land Cruiser. Not exactly a big number. There were times, towing up a mountain side that the mileage dropped down to 7, which really isn't a big number. But if you divide 9211 by 11 you get 837 which IS a big number and is the number of gallons of gasoline we burned on this trip. Multiply that by $2.40 (my best guess at an average gasoline price) and you get about $2000 worth of gasoline - obviously, a major expense. Divide that by 84 days and it comes to about $24/day in gasoline. Yeah, that hurts a bit!

6 - The number of states that were the target for this trip (Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina). Joan had been in Florida before (when we went to Orlando), but the rest of them were brand new states for her. We finished all the bucket list items in those states, so we 'only' have 37 states and territories left to visit. Still plenty to keep us busy. Should be noted that we went through Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to get to our target, but we will be back to visit them again later. For now, though, we are finished with 13 states, about a quarter of them.

17 - The number of bucket list parks we visited on Southern Charms. That includes 5 National Parks (Great Smoky Mountains, Congaree, Dry Tortugas, Biscayne, and Everglades), 5 National Seashores (Gulf Islands, Canaveral, Cumberland Island, Cape Lookout, and Cape Hattaras), 5 National Monuments preserving forts (Sumter, Pulaski, Frederica, Matanzas, and Castillo de San Marcos), and 2 National Monuments preserving Southeastern Native American sites (Russell Cave and Ocmulgee). Some parks are bigger and more interesting than others, but they were all worth the visits and we decided several of them deserve a revisit! That brings our total number of parks we've seen up to 73 with just 128 left to go, 64% of the bucket list remains. (Note: when Trump finishes his review of National Monuments, the number remaining may well go down!)

There are additional numbers we might use to describe our trip, but I don't have them yet. Things like the number of campsites and restaurants might be interesting. As well as the number of different cities we visited. And then there are my ecological zones. So there are definitely more stories to be told! We'll get there.

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