Observations on Me Driving

• I spend an unusual amount of time staring out the window.  I usually count to three, recheck the road, and then go back to staring.
• I look around the car a lot which sometimes looks suspicious to the person seated behind me.  I experience a unique joy if everyone but me in the car is asleep.  This seems somehow more efficient.
• The volume required to listen to an audiobook over the car’s sound system in a car going 70 is quite high.  If anyone was trying to sleep, using a bluetooth earpiece to listen was easier.

Other Observations

• The car (synecdoche) seemed to do fine on two meals a day and sometimes one.
• Everyone was reasonably able to sync their bowel movements to gas stops.  Only four times and never more than once in a day did we have to stop because someone just plain had to go.
• Gas never gets cheaper if you drive to try to find a cheaper gas station.
• I thought my car had a 12 gallon tank until I filled it with 12.26 gallons of fuel.  Turns out my car has a 50-liter fuel tank or 12.85 gallons.

Stats

• Total Distance: 4774.5 mi
• Best Tank of Gas: 32.3 MPG
• Worst Tank of Gas: 25.6 MPG
• Average: 29.1 MPG (a little lower than my day-to-day average of 30.1 MPG)
• Average cost per mile: $0.12
• Total cost of trip minus food: $1080.  Excluding opportunity cost, this trip was cheaper than my weekend trip to Chicago.
• Pool opportunities: 5
• Pool visits: 0
• Average steps per day: 7500 compared to the 13000 I otherwise average.
• Weight gained during trip: 0 (I consider this a victory as when traveling in a group I tend to gain weight)

I found the trip to be enjoyable but not quite a vacation as it was rarely restive.  I underslept for the last four days of the trip and the lack of alone time or ability to just unwind wore on me emotionally, physically, and mentally.  I also value relatively close reflection, and didn’t get as much one-on-one time with the other trip-goers as I would have wanted to.  I’m not sure how I’d deal with this in the future as it seems odd to just “sit out” a visit or activity.  I feel in a lot of cases, the fact that there were four of us worked against us as our hosts were more receiving a party than receiving a unit with enough internal cohesion to be mentally classified as a single four-faceted friend.

Pictures

While John looks to be in slightly more pain each day, I was glad I kept up with uploading pictures as we went.  This challenged my normal slow workflow and for the first time I embedded names and captions into the meta-data which I think helped.

Flickr Collection from trip.

Ending Anecdote

On the day of driving from Cross Lanes to home, I had logged a total of 300 steps before we set to drive for that day.  I knew I’d walk very little more during that day but my pedometer registered as needing a charge so I plugged it into its charger then plugged that charger in to a USB-120vAC converter and then plugged that into my car’s built-in inverter.  The swinging of the pedometer on the cable registered as a step and by the end of the day I had “walked” nearly 8000 steps.