New Mexico Trip Edition
The trip was to help a friend start to set up her new household in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The house is in the quintessential New Mexico adobe style and has 4 bedrooms and 3-1/2 baths with 10′ ceilings. Quite large for a single woman, but this is because she expects visits from several wings of her extended family (of which we are part of), some possibly overlapping.
She had received some of her furniture and kitchen stuff, so we at least had a bed to sleep on, but the rest of the place was, well, very uncluttered. Sally had really only been in the house for the past 2 weeks and she still had boxes everywhere that needed unpacking, Donna helped with that, and I went around and changed out a bunch of non-working light bulbs and a few other small “handyman” type jobs.
We were away from home for 10 days, 7 of them were traveling the roads of 5 of this country’s west and the other 3 were spent in and around 1 city, in 1 of those states. The rental car was ours for a total of 11 days in which we drove 2,819 miles. On the one total day that our Mitsubishi Outlander Sport was not traveling we added 5 miles picking it up, grocery shopped on our return, filling it up, picking up the Mini and returning it.
We bought gas a total of 8 times and purchased 92 gallons for $362 for an average cost of $3.93 per gallon. This is skewed a little lower because we used our Kroger gas points for 2 of the 8 fill ups, with out these points our average cost would have been $4.08 per gallon. The most expensive gas in Utah at $4.599 and the cheapest was in New Mexico at a Native American Pueblo. We averaged 30.5 MPG which is pretty good gas mileage for the size of the Outlander Sport.
We spent 5 nights in a motel, 4 of which were in Holiday Inn Expresses. The lone off-brand night was in Beatty, Nevada, because there are literally only a half dozen motels in town, and that was in a Motel 6. We spent $615 total on motels for an average of $123 a night. The most expensive stay was in Carson City, Nevada. And the least expensive was also in Nevada, the Motel 6 in Beatty.