Author: The Buchanans Rolling Down The Road

What can be said, about a crusty old curmudgeon, with no fixed address … not much I guess.

What’s the rush?

Friday April 3rd 2020

We are trekking across the country at a little faster pace than normal, there are a number of reasons for this, but the multiple reasons all come back to one main reason. Covid19 … let’s just say it has upset the whole world for lots of different reasons, but our first and foremost are concerns for our health, we don’t need to catch this virus, so along with being very careful with our social distancing and avoiding compromising situations we have decided to head back to Canada a little ahead of schedule. Also the hoarding that still seems to be very prominent is becoming a concern, we follow a number of full timers on a variety of social platforms and as most are American we find it very enlightening how they view the many different arising situations, here are a few examples, one Facebook friend who is maybe wound a little tighter than most to begin with, is actually looking for a conspiracy theory for the cause of the virus and the trillion dollar bailout package, at the same time friends from a YouTube channel are actually worried about their fellow Americans acting badly toward people from out of the area, possibly for taking their limited available supplies and then we remember that America has more guns per capita that any where else in the world, it could be a possible concern, it really could make sense. After all one of the hoarded items is ammunition, and gun shops are now being reclassified as essential services, and Thursday the Govener from Georgia has just now somehow realized that the virus can be spread by asysyematic people carrying the virus, and this is the kind of dummies in charge of a whole state, like seriously what rock has he been hiding under? All these things have influenced us to speed up our travel plans, along with the fact nothing is open. So add to that the fact we will be treated to a 14 day mandatory quarantine once we cross the border, it just makes good sense to move along. All and all 2020 is going to be a year for the books, and the sooner we get this whole mess in our rear view mirror the better. So as we look forward through the windshield, even if the park is not allowed to open as scheduled there will still be lots of things for us to do, we are driving through Oklahoma today I noticed the grass still seems to be growing and will need to be cut, along with lots of regular maintenance items at the park, so we will all just move forward and see how this turns out.

So yesterday was in the low 80’s or high 20’s, so nice and sunny and very warm if fact we had windows open to cool the coach, but after we settled in for the night some storm clouds with thunder and lightning rolled in at around nine o’clock last evening. We lost our satellite signal so we just turned in a little earlier for the evening just to be treated to a rain storm that turned to some hail and we awoke this morning to freezing temperatures and a wind chill factor of 19 or -7 degrees, just another indication of how spring may still be struggling to totally get control … just saying

So this morning had us running the boiler for heat and the generator to power an electric space heater to get us warmed up, today finds us heading east across Oklahoma, we had been hoping to make Tulsa or further today, but it’s a cold blustery day so we will get what we get, we will be taking I-40 to Oklahoma City and then we will be catching I-44 which is a toll road as we head toward Missouri. I have no great desire to drive in any rain and we could be driving into some as we move east so we may be hurting our travel average today.

We made it to a Flying J just east of Tulsa OK, so checked off another 241 miles (388 kms) through a heavily overcast day, I topped off our fuel tank again today 41.2 gallons (155.9 litres) @ $2.16 per gallon for a total of $88.89. A lot more than yesterday but this cold snap had us running the boiler all day for heat, and 3.4 hours of generator operation time to support the electric space heater earlier today. The solar system had a limited harvest today but with the coach alternator we topped the battery bank off again today. One last thing all these time changes are playing havoc on this old guy, as we are now in Central time zone so two down, just one to go…

Here is my observations from the drivers seat for today, it is very obvious that the state of Oklahoma is not a “shelter in place” state as traffic from passenger vehicles was the most we have seen so far on our journey. Today’s drive had us running through the rolling hills of Oklahoma, we have dropped down in elevation to less than 1000 feet (305 meters) as we work our way down to the Mississippi River valley. With today’s travel we have passed the half way mark and should get down under 1000 miles (1600 kilometres) on our journey.

First of all Oklahoma stay home and everyone else stay safe!

Texas bound

Thursday April 2nd 2002

A beautiful Thursday morning here in New Mexico, clear skies, another 80 or 27 degree day, we will have a little tail wind as we head east today on Interstate 40. Our expectations are to get into Oklahoma today after cutting across the Texas panhandle, and knock off another couple of hundred miles (three hundred and twenty kilometres) off of the journey back to Ontario. We have made it to Sayer OK, and after our travel today of 236 miles (380 kilometres) we have covered over 900 miles (1445 kms), tomorrow should have us passing the half way mark, again the highways are empty, I counted the passenger cars that passed us this morning and for the first hour it was 11 passenger vehicles, trucks and RVs only but it is making for a great drive.

Thunder was performing well through the mountains yesterday, but today we noticed a little stumble on a few grades as we rolled into Texas, after we made our way up through the high plains of New Mexico. The weather has been mainly clear and warm, between the coach alternator and the solar we are maintaining full batteries, and are trying to stay up to date with the most recent virus information as we move from state to state. We have tapped out our Verizon hotspot, and are now working on our US cell phone data, which should get us back to Canada or at lest real close … so the blog is safe for now … lol

Oklahoma fuel prices, are as shown here, todays fuel 20.8 gallons (78.8 litres) @ $2.22 per gallon (with our Good Sams Fuel discount) for a total of $46.18.

Much lower cost today because most of the day was across the flat high plains of Texas, in fact the on board computer has increased our fuel mileage 0.2 mpg over the last two days.

So let’s just throw some numbers out for March 2020. Of the 31 days we spent 11 with full hookups, which left 20 days of boondocking, our total cost for camping $347 or $12 per day this included a one year permit for Arizona State Land. We travelled 807 miles (1299 kms), as we moved back from Las Vegas Nevada to multiple spots in Arizona and on to Las Cruces New Mexico as we started back to Ontario. We ran the Generator for 1.9 hours one evening after multiple cloudy days, and 4.1 hours of boiler time to heat water, and we brought in 6817 amp hours of power from solar, in fact 18 days operating solely on our solar.

We are staying in a Flying J parking lot this evening, after topping our fuel tank, we settled in for the evening. We try to stay away from the truckers portion of the lot as Flying J is already very RV friendly, and provides a limited amount of spots for us.

But this jackass has now taken three of the spots by pushing slides out on a dropped fifth wheeler. DO NOT BE THIS GUY!

As Always: Practice social distancing and be safe!