2026 Utah/Colorado Parks Trip - Statistics

        Total Trip


Total Days 11
Days on the Road 11
Total Miles 3049
Average Miles/Day 277
Low Mileage Day 59
High Mileage Day 458

        Gas and Mileage


Total Gas Stops 26
Total Gallons 101.61
Total Gas Cost $501.72
Average Miles/Gallon 30.01
Average Cost/Gallon $4.94
Low Cost/Gallon $4.279 - Brigham City, UT
High Cost/Gallon $5.999 - Helper, UT

        General


Total States Visited 5
Total National Parks Visited 3
Total National Monuments Visited 1
Lowest Temperature 49.8°
Highest Temperature 97.6° 
Lowest Elevation 16'
Highest Elevation 11,101'
Days with Rain 1+
Nights in Motels 10
Average Cost/Night $166.84
Low Cost Night $120.06
High Cost Night $224.22
Wireless Connections 10
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. For this trip the Chrome extension was installed but I don't know if it worked or not.

Final Thoughts and Future Plans


This was another good trip - no major issues like a broken speedometer cable or anything like that. We're still experiencing the cruise control problem. It's interesting that the cruise control and the self-canceling turn signals either work or don't work at the same time. Interesting because they are both controlled by the speed sensor signal which is generated right inside the speedometer. Since that's the case, I decided to replace the speed sensor before the trip which entailed a major disassembly to get into the dashboard. I replaced the speed sensor thinking that might be the problem but unfortunately that didn't solve the problem. It seems that the cruise control works reliably at speeds of 65 MPH or above but, at lower speeds, it was very unreliable. Where I'm currently at is that the signal from the speed sensor actually goes back into the dashboard and then, when it comes out, the signal splits to the cruise control and the self-canceling circuit. So far I've been unable to find out what happens to the signal when it goes back into the dashboard but I'll keep working on it.

Before we left we had several maintenance items handled. On our last trip we heard scraping sounds coming from the front brakes so we took it into the shop. We also purchased a new front tire since the current one was worn. In the shop they replaced the brakes shoes, rotors, front wheel bearings and mounted the new tire. All of these worked well and were no problem for the entire trip.

What did happen somewhere along the way was one of the latches on the upper trunk lid broke. Actually the latch itself was fine but the plastic that it mounts to broke into several pieces. It appears that this is not unusual especially after this many years since the plastic begins to get brittle. I haven't taken the lid off yet to look closer to see if I can somehow re-attach the plastic but I'm not optimistic. I think my options are to attempt to repair the existing latch, Try to find a used lid on Ebay or somewhere like that and hope it's in decent shape, purchase a brand new lid for somewhere in the $500 range, or just go with the one good latch.

Like the last few trips we played music on my phone - mostly from recorded Sirius/XM stations. Because we have a subscription for the CRV, we also get PC streaming. That and the Audacity app let us record long 6 and 8 hour shows. We also have Waze running because it provides warnings of problems up ahead. Occasionally I switch to Google maps when I need navigation help but, for some reason, the Android player randomly stops when maps is running.

I use UltraGPS app on my phone to log a track record of the trip as a backup for my logger. This works fine but I have to use GPS Babel to shrink the size of the tracks since a typical day's track is over 2500 track points and my other software chokes on files that size.

Obviously gas costs took a huge jump over previous years. Last years average gas cost was $3.35 per gallon and this year it was $4.94 per gallon. It didn't help that we paid just under $6.00 per gallon in Helper, UT.

I inadvertently left a pair of shoes at the first hotel in LaGrande, OR which I discover 2 days later. I called the hotel and they checked and they had them in their lost and found. The next day I talked to the manager and she said if I would email a prepaid UPS or FedEx label, they would return them. I did that and they were waiting for me when we returned. I was very pleased because the shoes had custom orthotics that might have cost as much as $250 to $300 to replace.

The heat was definitely an issue. If we weren't staying at a hotel when we toured a park, we had no place to stow our jackets so that we could ride in T-shirts. We'll have to think about that for future trips. Also visiting 4 parks in 4 days was probably a bit much. We used to do that regularly but that was 20 years ago. Hiking was also somewhat of an issue. We definitely don't have the balance or sure footedness that we had 20 years ago.

So what do we need to do for the next trip? Hopefully fix the cruise control and come up with a solution for the trunk lid latch. Maybe some foldable hiking sticks although I'm not sure where we could put them. I also want to replace our tank bag. It's been a great bag but it has 25 years and 100,000 miles on it and it's disintegrating. It's some kind kind of heavy duty fabric with rubber backing and the rubber is breaking down and we have rubber everywhere.

That's all for now but I will update this page if  think of something I missed.

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