Wrap Ups

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.

What You Have Been Waiting For

Another one of my internet famous road trip wrap ups.

We were gone from home for a little over 2-1/4 million seconds or 26 days. This equates to 25 overnight stays of which 19 were in IHG properties. Eighteen of them were in our go to Holiday Inn Express and one that was called the Pagosa Lodge. Three nights were spent in a VRBO in Laurel, Mississippi (AKA Napierville) and the other four were at Casa de Sally in Santa Fe, NM.

The first leg of the journey was from home to Laurel and that was 10 straight days of driving with a new hotel every night. We have both decided that that is too much packing and unpacking in a row and have vowed to never do that again. The next leg was Laurel to Santa Fe and that was 6 days of a hotel every night. Which might be a day or two longer than we will be doing going forward without a two night stay in the same place. The last leg was 5 days from Santa Fe to home.

The original plan was to spend four nights over Memorial Day Weekend in Laurel, but after three days we had seen all we wanted to see so we opted to bail a day early and head down to Hammond, LA. While we were this far east we wanted get in a quick visit with Donna’s second Mom and mother to Donna’s childhood friend, the owner of Casa de Sally in Santa Fe, the nearly centenarian Adele.

Also part of the original plan was five nights with Sally in Santa Fe to help her but her first new car in 20 years. But with the combination of getting the car shopping out of the way in three days and our dread of the 450 miles of travel on I-40 plus navigating the very busy Las Vegas we opted to leave a day early and take a longer, less annoying way home.

When I plotted the route of the trip before leaving I measured the distance from town to town using Google Maps and came up with 5,480 miles in 19 days of traveling. With the 2 extra driving days and any wandering around at our stays we ended up with 6,450 for the whole trip.

The original distance estimates had the leg from Ely, NV to Green River, UT at 329 miles as the longest, but when we rearranged the return trip the stretch between Pagosa Springs, CO and Green River was supposed to be 421 miles. Usually we fill up the car either before turning in for the night or each morning before departure, but occasionally it happens mid-drive, so I can’t really tell you which day was the highest mileage drive.

The longest drive between fill ups was 364.6 miles and the shortest was 206.8 miles. The most expensive price for our required premium gas was $4.799 in Ely, NV and the least expensive was in Laurel, MS at $3.309. We spent $712.89 for the 177.303 gallons we bought for the trip making the average price paid $4.024 a gallon. Our average MPG for the trip was 36.61 and even though these are meaningless, the worst for a fill up was 30.85 and the best was 43.63 MPG.

This is getting long, tomorrow we’ll talk hotels…

Just Another Road Trip Wrap Up

For this last road trip we stated on a Sunday and finished two Sundays later for a total of fifteen days. Of that, seven days were driving, one full day spent in Moab and the other seven were in Santa Fe.

Like our last trip we rented a “car1“, a 2021 Mazda CX-5. Unlike last time though it was by choice because this time the Mini didn’t have any issues preventing its use. That last trip we had a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport and the CX-5, because it is a Mazda product, was a lot more engaging to drive.

For the seven non La Casa de Sally overnights, four of them were at a Holiday Inn Express, the other three were independents. The least expensive was in the independent in Beatty, NV at a few cents over a hundred bucks and it was what it was worth. The most expensive was the other non HIE in Moab and at a few bucks under two hundred dollars it was definitely not worth it, but it was $60 cheaper than the Holiday Inn Express in town, so there’s that.

We bought gas eleven times. The cheapest we paid for gas, not counting the final fill up in Klamath Falls because we got 80¢ off from points, was $4.17 a little west of Albuquerque. The most expensive was in just outside Las Vegas at $5.56 a gallon. We used 103 gallons to go a total of 3,120 miles for an average MPG of 30.4, even though the trip info on the CX-5 said it 32.6. This MPH compares nicely to that Mitsubishi’s number of 30.5 MPG, especially considering how often my foot was into that turbo 🙂 .