Well, we’re back in New Mexico. It was a great, fun, exhausting trip. It was great because we had a chance to see just about everybody I wanted to see on this trip. We spent good quality time with Sarah, and surprisingly Diane, whom we haven’t seen in almost 5 years. Also saw Homan, and visited the few who are still at the old stock exchange and even saw Virgie, my old co-worker from TSA. We visited Irene’s sister Shirley in Fallon, NV and stayed with our friend and ex-neighbor Linda in San Jose. Now we are glad to be home!
As I usually do, I kept a diary of my mileage. We traveled 3099 miles. I bought 122.6 gallons of gasoline, that cost $521.25. That equals an average price per gallon of $4.22. As usual, the cheapest gas was in Las Cruces and Lordsburg, New Mexico. In fact, those were the only places on the trip that were less than $4.00 per gallon. Honorable mention goes to Fernley, NV. where gas was $4.04 per gallon. The most expensive gas on the trip was (same as last trip) Tonopah, NV at $4.65. I averaged 25.28 mpg for the trip. Considerably less than the 33 I used to average in my Honda.
Now, I don’t like to make accusations or to insinuate that there may be some less than honest filling stations in the world, but…. I averaged between 27 and 28 mpg for every open road segment, except two! Those fillups occured in Buttowillow, CA, a gas stop on I-5 about 30 miles before the grapevine, and a fill-up in Phoenix (also close to the freeway). On both of those segments, my mpg was about 22. It doesn’t make sense to me, that freeway driving at moderate speeds (65 mph) would vary so drastically. And, I know that every time someone complains about this type of thing to newspapers or TV stations, they send someone out to verify that the pumps are accurate. But, the anecdotal evidence that pump gouging occurs is pretty strong. Almost everybody I know has a story to tell similar to mine.
When we returned to Las Cruces, the “monsoon” season had arrived! My neighbors tell me that we had almost 2 inches between July 1 (the official stat of the rainy season) and July 8. After we returned, we had about 3/4 inch in the next few days. That means we have now had almost half our average annual rainfall of 6 inches. Anyway, the photos are being sorted and resized, and Ill upload them shortly.
