2023 travel route

Let’s look back at our coach travel in 2023. You may also want to check out the 2022 travel summary and the 2021 travel summary.

We bought our 2017 Tiffin Allegro Bus 40SP diesel pusher motorhome on September 2, 2021, and other than a few times when we’ve been out of it during servicing appointments or flying vacations, we’ve lived in it full-time since then.

When we bought the coach, it only had 5,161 miles on the odometer. In 2021 we drove it about 2,300 miles. In 2022 we drove another 8,772 miles. In 2023 we added 9,945 miles, so have driven it 21,017 miles on our adventures so far, for a grand total of 26,178 on the odometer.

One of our goals is to visit every state in the US. In 2023 we stayed in 11 new states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida. These join Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas in 2022, and Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, California, and Arizona in 2021, for a total of 23. Not quite halfway! (We only count states visited since purchasing our coach.)

We also revisited several states last year, as we headed back to our Pacific Northwest domicile. So all the states we visited in 2023 — in order — were Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida; a total of 20 in the year.

Here’s a map of our coach travels and stays in 2023, via the excellent RV Life Trip Wizard website, using a variation of their maps that more clearly shows the state borders and color-coded time zones. We started the year in southern Texas, then the route headed north then west to the California coast, north to Washington, east to North Dakota, south to New Mexico (a detour for the Balloon Fiesta), then east to Alabama (barely), south to Louisiana, and finally east to the panhandle of Florida, where we finished the year:

Another variation of the map, with more detail:

Here’s the route map with the travel in 2022 and 2021 also displayed in different colors; our 2023 travel in purple, our 2022 travel in blue, our 2021 coach travel in green, and our 2021 Yellowstone rental trailer trip in brown:

The same map as an animated GIF, adding each year:

We actually revised our route a few times from what we planned for 2023; here’s an animated GIF that compares what we had originally planned (as shown in last year’s 2023 travel plans post), and what we ended up doing (as above):

Fascinating!