A couple of trip summary notes:
- The trip was around 8000 miles. I don't have an exact amount courtesy of terrible Ford software.
- The trip cost approximately $6304. This is the breakdown:
- Hotels came to $2979
- Fuel came to $1408
- Food was approximately $662, though that doesn't include stuff I had been accumulating for weeks before the trip.
- Souvenirs cost $753
- Other trip costs came to $502. This is for things like tolls, two oil changes, surprise tent equipment, bear stuff, and so on.
- I was averaging over 23mpg until my trips all got reset in Montana. I averaged over 22.3 all the way back to KY from there. Driving through Helene on the way back dropped that post-Montana average to just under 22, since the drive home was bad with tons of wind. My first tank driving home was only 16mpg, the second tank was just over 20mpg.
- Having a 36 gallon tank was extremely beneficial; it meant I never had to stop for fuel inside the parks, where it has a 1-2 dollar a gallon premium, and even in Yellowstone where everything was 2 hours away, I didn't have to stop and get fuel every day.
- My truck is a rolling electrical disaster exacerbated by some of the worst production software I have ever seen. I had three electrical issues on this trip: the park sensor in the steering column randomly didn't engage, the third light and dome lights refused to turn off regardless of what they were set for, and at one point the computer completely reset, even the dings when you leave the lights on changed.
- I only ate something like half the food I brought. While I understand overpacking on the lunches (which didn't account for leftovers from prior night dinners), I don't understand the discrepancy on dinners, of which I still have at least a half dozen left. I catalogued my foods on Discord though, so I can figure it out if I deem it pertinent.
- This trip is different from prior trips in that fuel was not the top expense. There are a couple of reasons for that.
- The first is that when I picked lodging I was willing to pay a premium to minimize daily commutes to the parks. The Absaroka Mountain Lodge for example was twice the cost of a Best Western type hotel in Cody, but was an hour closer to the park.
- In addition I got excellent fuel economy on this trip, far better than expected. None of my drives were rushed so I kept the speeds down (even in Montana with the 80mph speed limits I was typically only going 65).
- I also made my reservations late, and ended up in some more expensive places as a result. The reason I ended up in a tent in Grand Teton is because I couldn't find a hotel available. But even there I paid $75 a night for a primitive tent site because it was inside the park, instead of getting a place in Teton Village or Jackson Hole 45 minutes away.
I feel that this trip wasn't terribly well planned, I did a lot of unnecessary backtracking across Montana, and I didn't hit a ton of the local spots that I like to do in Wyoming, though this trip was a bit more time constrained. I got lucky that my blanket 3 days for each park was a good amount.
The cap survived, but I still plan to cut it up into small pieces and drop kick them into the dump.
Next year I get my 4th week of vacation, so I will need to start thinking about that, and whether to do one really long or two more targeted trips, and so on. I will also need a final answer on the cap situation too.
