The Great September Road Trip – Mileage, Fuel, Engines, and Motors

We just completed a month-long road trip covering 26 days, 7 states, 4457 miles, and several bucket list items checked off. Months of planning were involved, and after the fact, there is always laundry and catching up on other things. Not to mention the roughly 3,500 photos I need to edit.

I’ve kept mileage records for my cars since August 2014, first as a business log; more recently as a record for curiosity. I paid as little as $1.979/gal at Costco in February 2015, and as high as $5.559/gal in July of 2022 (excluding road trips and reward points). The highest I’ve ever paid for gas is $6.09/gal as we moved from Washington to Arizona at a station in Wikieup, AZ.

For this trip, I kept a trip log not only with gas prices but with mileage between some of the stops. I didn’t log every stop we made or the time we landed there, but some of the major stops were:

Mesa to Flagstaff, AZ – 176 miles
Flagstaff to Seligman, AZ – 75 miles
Seligman to Kingman, AZ – 85 miles
Kingman AZ to Needles, CA – 62 miles
Day 1 – 398 miles, 10 hours

Needles to Marina Del Ray, CA – 353 miles
Santa Monica to Monterey, CA – 216 miles
Monterey, CA to Grants Pass, OR – 552 miles
Grants Pass, OR to Redmond, WA – 465 miles
Redmond, WA to Boise, ID – 503 miles
Boise, ID to West Valley City, UT – 456 miles
West Valley City, UT to Flagstaff, AZ – 539 miles

Driving time was between 6 and 9 hours a day because it’s a road trip and there were numerous camera, bathroom, tourist, and food stops!

I expected we would see some fairly high gas prices as we hit California, but for the most part, prices stayed below $6 even in Monterey and Santa Monica, CA. We planned on buying at Costco when we could to save a few pennies, but in most cases we purchased at regular gas stations with no rewards or discounts.

Date                  MPG            Miles/Tank          Gallons       Price       Notes
9/3/2023         20.66078        227                        10.987        4.369     Costco Mesa AZ
9/4/2023         24.8282          336                        13.533        4.899     Kingman AZ
9/6/2023         25.4596          421                        16.536        5.199     Santa Monica CA
9/7/2023         26.60092        410                        15.413        5.499     Monterey CA
9/7/2023         34.79304        348                        10.002        4.999     Redding CA
9/8/2023         27.687            305                        11.016        4.539     Oakland OR (Rice Hill)
9/9/2023         19.73982        349                        17.68          4.759     Costco Redmond WA
9/15/2023       23.95137        394                        16.45          4.799     Marathon Lacey WA
9/26/2023       17.61252        225                        12.775        4.799     Costco Redmond
9/26/2023       25.81806        445                        17.236        4.499     Loves Ontario OR
9/28/2023       25.54095        373                        14.604        4.599     Arimo ID
9/29/2023       25.39208        340                        13.39          4.699     Beaver UT
9/30/2023       24.75775        511                        20.64          4.599     Costco Mesa AZ

As you can see, our mileage averaged right around 24/25 mpg, although the trip meter in the car averaged 26.5 mpg. With a 22-gallon tank, we tried to fill up when the tank hit 1/4, to avoid paying emergency prices at some station in the middle of nowhere. Even though we were fortunate (due to planning) not to pay high prices, there were several stations along the trip where we saw as high as $7.99/gal! Sinclair and Maverick had the most consistent pricing; surprisingly Shell, Chevron, and Union76 weren’t always the most expensive on the road. Love’s Truck Stops were either painfully high or right in line with Sinclair and Maverick.

Road trips are fantastic for conversations to while away the miles, and this trip was filled with several doozies. We commented several times about Diesel pricing, and I learned there are two grades of Diesel in the US. Diesel was consistently 30-50 cents or more pricier than gasoline.

We also had a spirited discussion about the difference between “motor” and “engine”, which is a concept I’d never considered. If it pleases the court, I maintain that if an “outboard motor” is really an engine, then that’s what it should be called. The words are used interchangeably, but by definition, it’s an engine, and I’d probably be laughed out of the rental place if I asked for an Outboard Engine for my (hypothetical) boat.

Calling out license plates on the trip was fun; the furthest being Florida and Maine. We did try to read or guess the state by the license plate.