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Southwestern USA 2010

By the Numbers

As promised, I’ve put together a brief trip recap for you. The trip was a lot of things, but as it turns out, it wasn’t generally at 75 miles per hour.

For me, the Denver to Denver round trip was about 4400 km or 2740 miles long. Of that, I drove about 8% (350 km or 217 miles). Mom drove approximately 1 km, driving us back to the hotel after Dad and I had one pint too many at the Irish Embassy in Durango. Dad drove the remaining 4000 or so kilometers (2500 miles). He’s a driving machine.

Fuel economy was good, all things considered. We averaged a hair under 30 miles per gallon. I won’t bother with the metric conversion, because it just doesn’t sound nearly as impressive.

By my estimate, we spent about 66 hours in the car. I spent 60 of those in the back seat, on the passenger’s side, behind Mom. Our average moving speed was only about 40 miles per hour. Vegas, Hoover Dam, mountains and the Apache Trail definitely pulled down the average. I’m going to guestimate that the top driving speed was about 85 mph – don’t tell the cops.

Outside of the car, we spent approximately 4 hours being shuttled by vans/buses/taxis, 1.5 hours in a helicopter, and another 1.5 in a hot air balloon. No trains, boats or roller coasters — had I been thinking further ahead, I could have accomplished all of these in about 30 minutes in Vegas.

To my knowledge, there was only one roadkill incident – a poor decision by a rabbit as we approached Kayenta, Arizona in the early evening. I’m excluding the hundreds of suicidal bugs that ended up on the front of the cars. All life is precious, but bugs that fly near highways aren’t quite as precious.

With that, I’m going to consider this vacation officially over. It was a winner. All that’s left now is for you to enjoy an old-fashioned home movie of highlights from the road. Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/yX2jEhvY2TU

2 replies on “By the Numbers”

Thanks Anna – glad you liked it.

I shot the video with a borrowed Flip Cam UltraHD. Simple to use, great results, though it ate batteries. Edited with iMovie. No complaints there either.

As for the balloon pilot — he knew a lot of things, but he didn’t know when to keep his mouth closed. None of us had the heart to tell him.

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