So…where to begin? Ah yes, I’ll begin at the beginning
Day One: My car hit 120,000 miles literally in the driveway as I was leaving my house 5 minutes early, naturally I couldn’t leave early, so as I was passing Jesuit i get a call saying I left my AirSoft gun (complements of the poor judgement of some Jesuit student) I go back, get teh gun adn leave at 7:00am. On the road, stopping occassionally to fill up or empty, sometimes both. Which went great until my credit card started getting declined. Apparently when Wells Fargo online told me I had $1200.00 of available credit what it actually meant was that I had less than 12 dollars of available credit. Bah, the payment from the car work didn’t go through. Anyway….Day 1: 638 miles travelled. Filled up on gas twice: once before the grapevine (I only put in 10 bucks worth) and once in East LA, at East LA I had a trip meter of 515 for 16.8 gallons of gas, giving a MPG of 30.6. Not bad. mad props to the rubber circle on the back of my Nokia
Day Two: So I woke up after a terrible night’s sleep, stole two bagels and hit I-10. Stopped like three times in Arizona, Got 11 gallons in Phoenix, with 334.5 on the odometer (31 mpg). 403 miles of Arizona, then New Mexico. New Mexico sucks. It is just plain terrible. As I’m going through the last 20 miles of Arizona I notice some dark clouds on the horizon. I kid you not, I cross the state line and there’s immediately a visibility impairing rainstorm. There was like an inch of water on the road, I had to cut my speed by so much. This goes on for like 10 minutes and finally I get out of it. So now it’s just raining a little bit, and it’s hot enough that it lands on my windshield and evaporates. The road is now dry, despite the rain. New Mexico is really just a filler state as far as I’m concenred, luckily Texas has established a colony on the frontier so that you don’t have to spend any more time in that state than you have to. That colony is El Paso. Thank goodness I only had to endure 180 miles of New Mexico, or else I might have even more to complain about. So day 2’s mile total was 585, giving a total distance travelled of 1221. The Haddad family very kindly provided me with food shelter and a car phone charger, way beyond what I could have asked, Much thanks to Eric’s family.
Day Three:Having company on the road was great. Though I apparently suck at math leading to a rather unfortunate incident that is best left unspoken. I filled up before leaving El Paso since my gas light was on (I didn’t want to stop in New Mexico) 14.5 gallons for a mpg of 30. Final gas stop was an amazing 393 miles later with 11.2 gallons for 35 miles to the gallon. I saw that and I was stunned. I love my Honda Accord. Just plain wow. So anyway my welcome back to Austin was the first traffic I’d seen in 3 days. Blech. I don’t know my way around yet, so I very intelligently left 290 opting instead to take Riverside across South Austin….not very bright. But I made it to the apartment and even managed to sleep. Hooray. 1819 miles in 3 days. Whine to me about the drive from Houston or Dallas, please. Watched Men In Black at Trey’s with Amy King and Santosh Dawson, it’s good to be back.
Today: Slept 11 hours. Went to Wal-Mart and dropped 150 dollars on towels and sheets and stuff.