According to Burroughs, Edison was the "intellectual" among the travelers, although Burroughs disagreed with the inventor when he claimed Evangeline and Les Miserables were the greatest works of poetry and fiction of his time and again when he proposed that Shakespeare be translated into "plain English."

The last camping trip took place in 1924. "The trips were good fun," Ford wrote in his autobiography, My Life and Work, "except that they began to attract too much attention." Ford's statement, however, belied his interest in the publicity received by the group. In 1918, for example, he requested that a typewritten report, containing verbatim news stories from all papers in the six states through which the party traveled, be prepared for his perusal. Similarly, it is difficult to believe that many of the contests and hijinks in which the aging vagabonds participated were not staged for the benefit of the nearby reporters and photographers (Edison, little less than Ford, was appreciative of publicity and a top-notch publicist). As Charles E. Sorensen wrote in My Forty Years with Ford: "With squads of news writers and platoons of cameramen to report and film the posed nature studies of the four eminent campers, these well- equipped excursions...were as private and secluded as a Hollywood opening, and Ford appreciated the publicity."

The trips also had become a formidable undertaking by 1924, what with the wives of the men coming along. The introduction of the women conventionalized the expeditions; they could not be as informal as they had been without them. Mrs. Ford took along a cook, Mrs. Edison a personal maid and chauffeur, and the Firestones a butler and a driver. Harvey Firestone, Jr. also took along riding horses; Ford didn't care for that. In addition, by 1924, the three surviving members of the original group (Burroughs had died in 1921) were older and, in the case of Ford and Firestone, busier .

Although the vagabonds camped no more, the publicity surrounding their expeditions acquainted millions of people with the pleasures of motor camping and undoubtedly inspired many auto owners to follow their example. The Vagabonds thus were the avant-garde of the countless vacationers, trailers in tow, who annually take to the highways, and of the huge recreational industry which serves them.