I hope you enjoyed the posts reviewing 2024. So what are our plans for 2025? Read on!
Like the previous year, we spent the holidays in the panhandle of Florida, in Carrabelle, then headed south in Florida. This time, though, we’ll be spending six weeks in Orlando, including a week in the Disney World bubble. (Unusual for us; we typically don’t stay in one place for more than two weeks, very rarely three weeks.) We won’t be going as far south as the Keys this year; instead we’ll head north, revisiting Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maryland, reaching the first new state of the year, New Jersey.
We’ll then head northwest via Pennsylvania to new states Ohio and Michigan for a graduation and time with friends, before heading east again, adding upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, then back west to add Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and continuing back to Ohio. That loop through the northeast states is a bit confusing; see an animated GIF below that hopefully clarifies that part. We would normally try to avoid backtracking, but the timing of the graduation dictated the route. We spread out the route to see different areas going there and back, so it’s all good.
After that, we head north to another part of Michigan, then back west via our favorite Black Hills area and Yellowstone National Park, reaching our home base in Washington state for the usual adulting and family time.
Finally, we’ll be heading south next winter, as usual for us snowbirds. But a little different this time: we’ll leave our coach at NIRVC in Phoenix while we travel to New Zealand for three weeks (probably), then finish the year in Arizona and California.
A lot of this is still tentative; we’ve currently booked up to the beginning of September. And we will try to change some of the stops to free alternatives (using our Thousand Trails membership) when they’re available to book.
All up, we should visit 10 new states in the northeast, so by the end of the year (actually by the middle of the year) we will have visited all 48 contiguous states, with just Alaska and Hawaii remaining. We’ll visit those two in a subsequent year (to be determined).
This route should be a little shorter than last year, at around 10,800 miles, give or take.
Here’s a map that shows the state outlines, colored time zones, our travel route, and pins for stops. Our route begins in the panhandle of Florida, and goes generally anti-clockwise, with a loop in the northeast:
Another variation of the map, that shows a little more detail, but the states are less visible:
That northeast corner looks a bit messy, doesn’t it? Here’s an animated GIF that shows the route:
Another interesting animated GIF, showing the elevations along our route; see the elevations and road gradients at the bottom, and a moving dot along the map route showing where those elevations occur (this route has a couple of minor differences from the above maps, but I didn’t want to bother redoing the GIF):
Super flat until we reach the Bighorn mountains and Yellowstone in Wyoming.
Here’s a Google Maps list that shows the places we’ll stay, as of now; it will be updated as campgrounds are booked.
It’s going to be another busy year. I hope you’ll follow along via this blog and the YouTube channel.
