2025 Voyageurs National Park Trip - Statistics

        Total Trip


Total Days 13
Days on the Road 11
Total Miles 3832
Average Miles/Day 348
Low Mileage Day 144
High Mileage Day 463

        Gas and Mileage


Total Gas Stops 33
Total Gallons 125.66
Total Gas Cost $421.35
Average Miles/Gallon 30.51
Average Cost/Gallon $3.35
Low Cost/Gallon $2.849 - Jamestown, ND
High Cost/Gallon $4.799 - Ellensburg, WA

        General


Total States Visited 7
Total National Parks Visited 2
Total National Monuments Visited 0
Lowest Temperature 57.1°
Highest Temperature 94.2° 
Lowest Elevation 4'
Highest Elevation 6,431'
Days with Rain 1+
Nights in Motels 9
Average Cost/Night $177.51
Low Cost Night $97.74
High Cost Night $228.33
Wireless Connections 9
Wired Connections 0
No Connections 0


Web Statistics


I don't usually look at the website statistics since I don't share the links with anyone and don't usually complete all of the pages until after we returned home. These pages are really for our own use anyway so I'm not that concerned with  how many people view or follow our pages. That being said I did take a screen shot of the new Google GA4 Analytics for our pages. In reality, I haven't figured out how to filter out my personal traffic when we are on the road so a lot of that traffic may be my own. I did finally find a Chrome browser extension which purports to serve this function but I found it after the trip and haven't verified that it actually works yet.

Final Thoughts and Future Plans


The plan before we left was to ride to Mike and Karin's home in Mandan, ND, spend some quality time with them, and then ride to International Falls and visit Voyageurs National Park. All of this was weather permitting and, for the most, the weather cooperated. On Day 9 just outside of Redwood Falls with only a few miles to go the skies opened up and we got soaked. We thought we could make it before the rain hit but that would not be the case. Once it started there was no place to stop and put on the rain gear so we just rode through it. Then on Day 11 from Kadoka,  SD to Laurel, MT it rained off and on most of the day. We put our rain gear on before we left and wore it all day.

While in Mandan Mike took us to the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum. We have visited there before but it has been greatly expanded since that6 last trip. It was definitely interesting and we really only saw part of it. We will definitely plan to go back on our next trip. We also washed the bike, got the top layer of bugs off, and generally chilled out.

Voyageurs National Park was about what we expected. There are 3 visitor centers which are apparently pretty similar but a long ways apart. We chose to just visit the Rainy Lake Visitor Center which is about 10 miles outside of International Falls. There was a small museum with artifacts from the original voyageurs. These voyageurs first came to the area in the late 1600s and were the backbone of the fur trade until the late 1800s. We also viewed a short video that covered information about the park and it's history. We talked with the ranger assigned there who recommended a short hike of about 2 miles which we took although, as I mentioned in that day's post, it was a little treacherous. The visitor center is also the starting point for the various boat trips in the park's lakes. The boat tours are very popular and booked months in advance so we were not able to join any of them. It was an interesting visit but I don't imagine we will be going back any time soon.

During most of the driving we used the Android Music Player to play the mp3 files on my phone which we recorded from XM/Sirius. We also used Waze to keep track of where we were going and get notice of accidents or construction on the roads ahead. We also got notice of speed traps but there were really not many of those and we ride very conservatively anyways. The only issue came when occasionally the music would stop playing and we had to restart it. It didn't happen more than a couple of times and it was easy to restart on the run.

We had trouble with the cruise control on the last trip but it worked great this trip until the last 100 miles. During this last stretch it would just cancel seemingly randomly or, if you tried to set it, it would  come on and then immediately cancel. On the previous trip I thought the problem might be related to the rear brake pedal but that didn't seem to be the case. The problem is that there are at least a half dozen things that can cancel the cruise control once it's set, so it can be hard to troubleshoot. I will definitely have to dig into this before any more long trips.

While on the subject of the bike, I started hearing scraping noises from the front brakes early on in the trip. I'm pretty sure I will need to replace the disc brake shoes before any other trips. The bike still stops very well with just the rear brakes so I tried not to use the front brakes if I didn't have to but the muscle memory kept kicking in despite my best efforts.

Somewhere along the way, the right hinge on my glasses broke. I could still use them but I had to be very careful. When we arrived in Mandan my first stop was at the local Costco. They didn't have any spare parts but they were able to make them temporarily usable with some short pieces of heat shrink tubing. This worked great and got us through the remainder of the trip. I used to carry previous glasses as spares but, since I had cataract surgery, the previous glasses would not work. I'll have to get another pair so I have a spare when traveling.

As I was preparing for the trip I discovered battery problems with both the Lenovo laptop we bring with us as well as the camera Linda uses for our pictures. I did get the camera battery up and running but still got a spare just in case. This is the only time we use this camera so apparently the battery completely drained over the last year. I was not able to get a battery for the computer before we left but, as long as it was plugged in, everything was good.

In general overall gas costs were pretty similar to last year. In fact the mileage for the trip was almost identical to last year's trip. It was also painfully obvious how high our gas prices in Washington are compared to every other state we visited. Speaking of gas, we saw some gas pumps like we had not seen in a long time. In one station there was no way to pay at the pump. You just started the pump, filled the tank, and then went inside to pay. There were also several pumps where you had to remove the nozzle and then left the mount to activate the pump. I haven't seen any of those in years.

Hotel prices seem to just get higher every year especially in Montana. They are definitely very proud of their hotels.

I mentioned the issue with road assistance insurance in the prologue and we did get a renewal in time but we obviously didn't need it so I guess having it works.

Just one final point. We both got smart watches that track a lot of things like heart rate, blood pressure and steps. We noticed that we were getting a lot more steps than we suspected we should and it appears that all of the small bumps on the road cause the watches to record steps.

No plans at this time for next year but we'll keep thinking about it.

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