Road Trip

Mileage Matters

Off-Road?

Day before yesterday was the one-year anniversary of owning the new Miata. Yesterday the car rolled past 19,000 miles on the odometer. This almost got close to the 22,000 miles I put on the first Miata thirty-five years ago. If I hadn’t taken the 10,500-mile Jumbo Road Trip the new car would have been under the total miles you can use on a low-mileage lease.

Only 500 of those twenty-two thousand miles back in 1989-90 were because of one road trip to New Orleans. The rest were mostly because I think I drove it every day on my lunch hour, for that whole hour. I just wandered the backroads nearby to the plant. One of the engineers noticed what I was doing every day and said to me once, “I know where you’re going.” “You are driving through downtown so you can see your reflection in the shop windows.” He was way off; I rarely went near downtown on the drives; mine were more therapeutic in nature. He meant it as a joke, so I applauded him for that.

Sdrawkcab Og Ew

Buckey at Brevada

We’ll start with the last one I took. I ostensibly came to Klamath Falls for that Smoothie Bowl from Brevada tomorrow morning, but I also wanted my route to take me through Crater Lake National Park so I could take a picture of their post office. That is the next one in reverse order.

Crater Lake – I was lucky to get this close to the building that houses the park’s post office. The National Park was hopping on a summer Sunday. (8/24/25)

While I was in the park, I stopped at a couple of overlooks and a couple of visitor centers. I bought a couple of postcards and a sticker for Buckey’s trunk lid. At my last stop the morning mist and smoke that had obscured the lake was starting to burn off, but for the first couple of photos you had to imagine that deep blue the lake is famous for.

Before I left to head south, I captured the last post office in Eugene. Then I had breakfast right next door to the last of the three post offices left hanging out there on OR-126 on a ninety-mile out and back.

Sdrawkcab Og Ew is We Go Backwards backwards.

Sunday Fun Day

Yesterday was a longer day, 300 miles and 8 post offices compared to today’s 240 miles and 6 post offices. But it sort of evened out because Saturday eastbound on I-84 was nicer than today’s westerly trip home. Although, if I could have swapped the order of I-84 and OR-74 which would have made the day finish up with some nearly zero traffic twisting and bobbing roads, today would have been a great drive.

This weekend’s haul took my post office tally to 252 out of the 390 total or about 65% done. There are around 90 or so left that are densely packed along the coast and the southern portion of I-5. The remaining 40-ish out east are widely scattered and will need several more long drives with more than just one overnight stay for each trip.

Dualling Shovels

I feel a little cheated, don’t they fact check over there at the Roadside America HQ? Back in May on the way back from Hammond with Santa Fe Sally I made us stop just outside of Wichita Falls, TX to take a photo of the Largest Shovel in Texas at 15 feet high. In the blog post about it I said, “… someone will take that as a challenge and make one 25′ tall somewhere else in the state.”

I have been pre-planning another jaunt with Sally for later this year. Today I was looking for a different route across the great state of Texas to go between Santa Fe and Hammond. We did it last time with a single overnight stop in Bowie, TX, and we’d would like to do that again, but I’d like a different path to mix it up. So I started dragging the blue line on Google Maps around and came up with something promising that loops south of Dallas.

The next thing I look for is hotels at the overnight spot, some small towns in the middle of nowhere don’t have many places we’d stay in, we have some standards, you know. Off I went to Roadside America to see if there is something weird that would hopefully be near a driver’s change spot. I opened the Texas map and zoomed into an area where I thought we would be and saw something labeled World’s Largest Shovel. Wait a minute, I thought I’d been to the largest shovel in Texas? I had, but it was only the tallest one until this beast was created in 2020.

The Wizard of the Sphere

In November I’m going down for another visit with Santa Fe Sally. The impetus for the trip is a good old Thanksgiving dinner with her family. This means another drive to Hammond, Louisiana, but first is a trip to Monument Valley. She has always wanted to go, and she has a State Department friend that lives in northern New Mexico that has the same desire, but neither wanted to go alone; enter Brian. Sally and I will be in Tucson, and her friend will be in her own car (she is having it serviced in Arizona before meeting us there.)

Sally and I had planned on looping by the Grand Canyon and other places after the Monument Valley visit, but things took a turn over the weekend when Sally saw the video below. She is a big fan of the Wizard of Oz and wondered if we could maybe add a stop in Vegas. So guess who just spent over $200 to see a movie that could be watched for free on numerous streaming services and has his own copy of it?

Miata World ’99 Revisited

Getting the Shot at Miata World ’99 in Dallas


Back in February of this year I took a photo album from 1989 off the shelf and scanned the photos I liked. I then used them to create five separate posts of content out of it.

Today I jumped ahead a decade to 1999 and scanned some images from the photo album of our trip to Dallas to a national Miata event. Most of these photos aren’t nearly as scenic as the 1989 ones. If you are new around here you might assume that all that Roadside America stuff from the recent April-May-June trip was something new, au contraire, I’ve been making road trips “meaningful” that way since the end of the last century. Postcards also played a crucial roll in this trip as well. See the – Slow Miata to Texas Tour

Jumbo Road Trip Round Up

I left Fairview on April 18th and returned 61 days later on June 17th. It was really only 60-1/2 because yesterday was the second shortest drive of the whole trip, I was home by mid-morning. Wethersfield, CT, to Springfield, MA was the shortest at 30 miles.

There were 35 driving days, ranging from 3 hours all the way up to 9 between leaving one place in the morning and arriving at that night’s stay. The average was probably around 7 or 8 hours with stops. I traveled through 31 states, including five new to me; Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho. This leaves just one state out the 50 I have not spent any time in – Alaska. I also crossed one Canadian province, Ontario

Now let’s talk about how far I drove. Day before yesterday I mentioned 526 miles until I discovered that the odometer only went up to 9,999.9 miles in Coeur d’Alene, ID. I added that to the 9,500 I had at the coffee stop in Billings and got a total of 10,026 miles driven. Because I always enter my gas info into the Fuelly app when I fill up, I downloaded all the fill ups from the trip and added up the total mileage and the figure was 10,025.1! Perfect, right? Not so fast there sailor. I went out to the car this morning and got the mileage from yesterday’s morning’s fill up in eastern Oregon. It was 163.3 giving a trip total of 10,188.4 miles. Things got interesting when I checked the B Trip number, it read 445.6. Add that figure to the 9,999.9 and you get a grand total of 10,445.5. And that number is the minimum, because, remember, I didn’t know how long B Trip had been maxed out. I’m rounding it out to 10,500 miles.

That last twist also means I didn’t capture a gas fill up that covered 450-ish miles. All told, I used a total of 277.876 gallons (that I accounted for) at an average price of $3.829 a gallon. The lowest price paid was in North Dakota of $2.839 and the highest paid was $4.999 in Maine.

I spent 21 days at the houses of friends and relatives. There was 18 days in hotels, 16 days in Airbnbs and 5 in VRBOs. The most expensive night was an Airbnb in Rochester, MN at $258.49, but it was nearly the nicest place I stayed in, plus it was walking distance to downtown and the Mayo Clinic Hospitals. The cheapest night was at the Holiday Inn Express in Lubbock, TX, but only because it was free, I used my IHG points. The real cheapest was the Airbnb Sally and I split the cost of in Hammond. The lowest I paid for a room for me was $96.11 at the Quality Inn in Robbinsville, NC. I’m always saying that staying in an Airbnb is almost cheaper than staying at a chain hotel, well, its close, but not true. The average for the hotels came in at $142.37 and the Airbnb and VRBO came in at $163.63, but I think it is worth the extra dub (or double sawbuck.)

How much money did I spend on the trip total? I know the gas costs (sort of) I know the total of how much it cost to spend the night out and I can tell how much cash out I took at ATMs, but I don’t feel like combing through every purchase using the charge card to find out where it went on all the incidentals, so a ballpark figure would be $10k. I decided to do just that. Went back to the May & June credit card bills and crossed out all the stuff is all the streaming services, my internet and a couple Amazon purchases that weren’t trip related. Grand Total: $7,920.67

Was it worth it? Hell yes, and then some. Will I do it again, probably. I know the Miata’s trim level is called GT for Grand Touring, but the next time it will be in a true GT car. This 70-year-old body still has no trouble getting in an out of a Miata, but is more the car’s lightweight and single suspension setting that beats up my aging internals.