The Prices!

We are obviously now back and I've posted all the remaining reviews on parks.

The last prices were within the range I've mentioned before.

The two highest parks were Oasis in Las Vegas; and the Sac West Park which was an old KOA. Both were still under $60 at $57 and $58, respectively. We were a bit out of season at Oasis, though and the winter snowbird season is a few months away, so that $57 will probably be higher then. The Sac West Park is overpriced for what you get (said as an adult without small kids).

The lowest was the Bakersfield park at $27 (just really only good for an overnight).

But the average turns out to be about $42 or so. We had a few nice surprises and a few not-so-nice ones. I think the other park where I was a bit grumbly was the Salt Lake City "Pony Express" park which wasn't awful, but it's now owned by Sun Resorts and, for better or worse, corporate ownership may push prices up or at least mean that local areas have less ability to respond to their local markets. (Now, to be fair - we did get a 20% "fall" discount, but I'd be a lot more grumbly at their normal prices.)

We used our Good Sam card everywhere. Even though we also have Passport America, it was useless this trip. Oh well - it's so inexpensive, we figure as long as we use it once in a while, it's more than paid for itself.

We did buy tires in Portland, Oregon - mainly because there is no state sales tax. From a high tax state like California, we decided to take advantage of this for a big ticket item.

We didn't eat out a lot this trip, and bought fewer things, so all in all, it was fairly inexpensive. Except for fuel - it was uniformly high everywhere, and wasn't very state specific (except again for California, but we live here and know how awful gasoline is due to excessive taxes.) I didn't notice huge differences once out of California. We tried to only use Pilot/Flying J to get the Good Sam 5-cent discount.

Thanks everybody for contributing to the thread. I think overall I was more happy than not and in the places where we noticed some price increases, they mostly seemed reasonable (e.g., Lolo, Montana was $27 a few years ago and this time it was $31 - not too bad.)