Our cross-country drive began one month ago today. How time flies. The trip took us a total of nine days, including the short jaunts on Day 1 from San Francisco to Roseville and on Day 9 from Kinderhook to Saratoga Springs. That leaves seven days of intense driving, with an average of 548 miles driven each of those days. The longest stretch we drove was on Day 5 from Alanreed, Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas (736 miles).
Of course, that distance doesn’t seem like much compared to the 1,085 miles Jen and I once drove in a single day from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Sacramento, California (summer 1999 during my second East-West cross-country drive of that summer), or the 869 miles that my bro and I once drove in one day in a 24-foot moving truck from Sacramento to Tucson, Arizona.
Our 2003 cross-country trip spanned 3,899 miles from San Francisco to Saratoga Springs. We used 162.487 gallons of gas, which cost $279.87. We paid an average of $1.71 per gallon of gas, whose octanes ranged from 91 to 94. We got an average of 24.50 miles per gallon, with a station-to-station low of 16.94 and a high of 29.27.
For more details and daily mileage numbers from our trip, refer to the A_nderson Cross-Country Trip 2003: Mileage/Gas Data spreadsheet. Yes, I love tracking and analyzing data like these. But you’ve probably figured that out by now.
Even though we’ve long since concluded our cross-country trip, I wanted to wrap things up with a Day 9 post. Day 9 is not only the 62 miles we drove from Kinderhook to our new home in Saratoga Springs, it is the next phase in the journey of our lives.
