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.

Ellensburg, WA

Maine License Plate in Page, AZ

Roys in Amboy, CA

Route 66, Ash Fork, AZ (I don’t think these work)

Goffs, CA

Hesperia, CA

San Francisco, CA

Alaska License Plate

Alaska License Plate

Safe Travels and God’s blessings! You can continue to follow our adventures on Facebook at Normads (Norman Adventures), or here on the blog.

Adventures in Rental Trucks

Well, the first trip of our season of adventure has been fraught with challenges and we’re only at the first weekend. 3 weeks ago, I reserved a 10’ U-Haul truck in Edmonds, WA. The plan is/was to drive my youngest son’s belongings from the storage unit in Kirkland, WA to Phoenix, AZ. Along the way, we were driving to Boise, ID to visit my daughter and her family; my oldest son was coming over with us, my youngest son and girlfriend were flying up from AZ, and our oldest daughter and her family were meeting in Boise after spending a week in Yellowstone (on their way back to Redmond). The best of a road trip and a family reunion all in one weekend!

After the weekend in Boise, the youngest son, his girlfriend, and I were driving the U-Haul to AZ, while the others returned to Redmond. So, when we picked up the U-Haul on Thursday, we noticed there were only two seats; a problem as there will be 3 people in the truck on the way down. The U-Haul dealership had no other rentals, and there were none in an easily accessible driving time, so I made the decision to change the contract from Edmonds to Phoenix, to Edmonds to Boise; hoping we could rent another truck in Boise that would have 3 seats and would take us to Phoenix.

PRO-TIP: U-Haul rentals 10’ and under ONLY HAVE TWO SEATS (a/k/a bucket seats). This includes pickup trucks and vans.

We had a Plan B (by now is more of a plan F), which was for me to fly down while my son and his girlfriend would drive down. This completely ruined the idea of a road trip, but…

I called my daughter in Boise and asked her to look for a rental with 3 seats that we could rent. She found a dealership that would put us in the system and call me when they had one for me to rent. I set up an online account, filled out all the necessary information, and waited for their call.

We loaded up the truck we had and set off on the trip from Edmonds to Boise (via Redmond to drop off the dog and pick up the oldest son). Mid-day through this leg of the journey, I received a call from U-Haul that they had a rental for me. According to the representative, the truck was 115 miles from Boise, and I was willing to drive the 90 minutes to pick up the truck, so I accepted it and she put my name on that truck.

My daughter (in Boise) looks at the map and discovers the rental dealership is nearly 4 hours (ONE WAY) from Boise, and in a mountainous region. So, she called another dealership in Boise and found a 20’ to reserve for me that we could pick up on Saturday; this one was just a few blocks from where I needed to drop off the 10′ truck.

To add to the “fun” of the U-Haul challenge, we arrived in Boise on Friday evening late to find out there was no water at the Air BNB. Although our son and his girlfriend had arrived Thursday night and took showers Friday morning, at some point during the day, the water was shut off. This required a call to the host, who resolved the problem with the City in time for us to shower Saturday night (we took showers at my daughter’s house Saturday morning).

Saturday, after a great breakfast at a cute place called Blue Bench Brunchette, we did the U-Haul shuffle – renting the 20’ truck at one dealership, then driving to a second dealership to unload the 10’ and return it. 2 hours later, we finished and went bowling at Big Al’s.

You would think that would be the happy ending of this story, BUT…Today I went to fill up the tank on the truck (they rented it to us with ¼ tank) so we could leave tomorrow without delay. I start the truck and the CHECK ENGINE LIGHT is on!

Insert “FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY” shout!!!!

Of course, it’s after the dealership has closed, so I call roadside assistance. The wait time (assuming that’s only because it wasn’t an emergency) was 30 minutes, so I decided to go online and file a claim, then spent the next 45 minutes in a text chat with them. Their answer? As long as the light isn’t blinking, and there are no other lights on, we can continue our trip, or go to a U-Haul center to have a diagnostic run. If we have issues on the drive I need to call the phone number and use the claim I just filed so they have the record. Well, that makes me comfortable driving another roughly 1,000 miles, especially as this hasn’t been the smoothest U-Haul rental.

We set out at 9:30 am and made it to Ely, NV with no issues, one refueling, and a couple of stops for leg stretching and snacks at 4 PM (one hour lost because Nevada doesn’t observe Daylight savings time).

Our next leg is from Ely, NV to Gilbert, AZ, where we’ll unload the truck at my son’s rental, then return the U-Haul (with ¼ tank of gas) and move on to the next part of the adventure.