Back home.  And…damn…it’s cold outside.

I arrived home late last night, but I know it’s possible now to drive from Southern Georgia to Baltimore in one day.  I didn’t hurry it…just kept driving knowing that even if I got home late, I would have a place to sleep.  Sometimes when you’re on the road, you stop early for a motel room before they’re all booked up.   I’d have loved to stay in Key West through New Years, but I didn’t realize it would be so expensive to stay down there and I basically ran out of hotel money for this trip.  Next time I’ll be ready.  Even with the price of gasoline being what it is now, the major cost of a road trip are the lodgings.  I’m still paying off last year’s trip to Portland, which is another reason why I didn’t have much to spare to spend on this road trip.  When I get everything added up, I’ll post the totals here. In the meantime, here are the stats according to Traveler’s onboard trip computer…

• Miles Traveled: 2832
• Hours Driven: 51.45
• Average mpg: 28.7
• Average Speed: 55mph

All that’s over the course of the entire trip, including driving around Hilton Head for a bit, around Orlando and the area around Disneyworld for a bit, and all the driving I did around the Florida Keys.

I actually got 31 miles per gallon driving back across the keys from Key West to the mainland!  So now I know that my car with that big Mercedes v-6 engine in it will still do over  30 miles per gallon…if I drive it at an average speed of about 45 miles per hour over terrain that is almost totally flat.  But I’ve discovered to my relief on this first big road trip, that it’ll do nearly 30 mpg if I drive it for extended periods at highway speeds.  Typically my trip computer was reading around 29.3 to 29.8 mpg after a few miles down I-95.  That’s Much better then I was expecting.  I have compared the trip computer to my gas purchases  and mileage, which I’ve been recording in a little notebook ever since I bought the car, and they match to within tenths of a gallon, so I’m pretty confidant that the trip computer is giving me an accurate account of miles per gallon as I go down the road.

I’ve put on enough miles now that I can go get my free first tire rotation.  I’ll need to ask them to check out the area around my gas filler.  I pulled over in a small town in North Carolina looking for gas, and saw that the Hess gas station had the good price so I went there and the pumps weren’t working right.  The first pump I went to took about a minute to pump only a half gallon.  So I closed out the transaction there and moved to a different one which was still slow, but not painfully so.  But good thing I always stay near the pump while it’s working, because that one didn’t cut off when it had filled the tank and suddenly I had a massive overflow on my hands.  It was scary…dripping all over the passenger side rear tire and down around the filler cap.  I put the hose back on the pump, doused the area with water from one of the washer stations, and went inside to warn them that they had a dangerous situation with that one pump, and the clerk just nodded her head and said, "Oh yes, you have to watch that one or it’ll do that…"

Christ!  The saving grace of it was it was raining and the roads were wet.  I doused the area with water once again and then drove Traveler through several big puddles and then back onto I-95 where the tire could spray water into that wheel well that got drenched.  Maybe I should have called the fire department on them too, but being by myself in a small southern town I wasn’t sure I wanted to.  I knew they were thoughtless assholes.  If they had a mind to, they could have accused me of damaging their pump somehow and then it’s that little northern faggot against the local boys and I might have ended up being the one in trouble.

So when I take Traveler in for its tire rotation, now I have to ask them to check around the area of the filler cap for damage.  Gasoline is a powerful solvent.  I’ve used white gasoline, the stuff you can buy for camping stoves that comes without all the additives they put into automobile fuel, occasionally for really tough chores like hardened brushes.  But you can’t be too careful with it, and not just for the dangerous fumes, but also what it will damage if it gets dripped on.  So I’m fretting a bit now about what that spill might have done to my new car.