Nov 29th marks three years on the road and we wouldn’t be geeks if we didn’t dig into some of the collected data about the last three years. Home is where we park it, so let’s start by taking a look at what that parking has cost over the last three years.
Most expensive park: $184 per night at Disney’s Fort Wilderness in Orlando, FL (note: this record will be broken in 2024 after our week at the Sugarloaf/Key West KOA with the eye-watering price of $270 per night). Fortunately, these higher rates are only for vacations, so we’re not paying the usual monthly rates during those times.
Least expensive park: $30 per night at the Washington/Pittsburgh SW KOA
Average nightly park cost by year:
Um, what the hell, 2023? Taking a look at what we’ve spent per month since we started, summer 2023 was three months of financial anomaly (and so much fun, since that’s when we were in Boston). That unusually high point in Feb 2022? Yup, that’s Disney.
It isn’t all an outflow though. Since August of 2022, we’ve saved the following with camper discount programs:
| Discount | Savings |
|---|---|
| Good Sam | $442 |
| KOA | $1,331 |
| AARP (Saved money, despite not being retired) | $40 |
Of the 74 parks we’ve stayed at, electric has been included in 63 of them. For the 11 parks where we paid electric, the average monthly price was $84.88
The observant may have noticed we didn’t share our annual gas expenses yet and let’s be honest, there’s just some math you don’t want to do. We get ~8 miles per gallon of diesel and we’ve traveled 18,773 miles since leaving Delaware. That’s approximately 2,346 gallons of diesel fuel purchased. For those who want to do their own math, the average price of diesel last year was $4.989. Now please allow us this moment of denial while we never think about that number again.
Well, that should give you an idea of where our money goes (when it’s not paying for dog stuff, of course). Stay tuned for more analysis of the places we’ve been and how we get there.