Math

Post #5,459

In the right hand column the is a widget called “a decade ago” and the one for today is Post #3,290 which signifies that from January 1st 2002 when I started this nonsense, until September 29th 2009 I have authored three thousand two hundred ninety posts. That means over those 2,829 days I averaged 1.16 posts per day.

The title of today’s post represents the grand total of posts I have created since 1/1/2002. So in the last ten years I have added a total of two thousands one hundred and sixty nine more. This means over the ensuing 3,653 days I have averaged 0.59 posts per day. Just a little more than half my previous output. I think I must be running out of words…

Fun with Figures

Day 2 of Not Being on our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

We were gone for 31 days and of those, 20 were spent driving from one place to another. There was a day in west Texas visiting Donna’s brother, a couple days in Albuquerque, seven days in Lake Tahoe and another day in Louisiana visiting a friend. We filled up with gas 18 times and used a total of 190 gallons for the 7,291 mile trip for an average of 38.4 miles per gallon.

The Mini uses premium fuel and I never really shopped around so take these numbers for what they are worth. The cheapest gas (besides the original fill up at home) was in Pelham, AL at $2.95 a gallon. The next cheapest was in Albuquerque, NM at $2.96. The highest was in Reno, NV at $3.72 a gallon and the second highest was also in Nevada in West Wendover at $3.63. For the trip we averaged $3.21 a gallon and spent a grand total of $677.05 on fuel.

Like I did 9 years ago with a rental car when we went out west, I attached a static cling travel bug to the back of the Lady Bug for our drive to and from the west, And just like that one no one spotted it on the car and logged it. I dipped it in about half of the geocaches we did along the way to rack up some miles anyway. Because the mileage for travel bugs is tallied in a “as the crow flies” manner between caches it only totaled only 4,834 miles compared to the 7,291 the car itself traveled.

We geocached for 17 of the 31 days on the trip. We looked for 70 caches. We found 63 and DNF’d seven for a success rate of 90%. Our biggest day was finding 12 caches, missing 2, on a Tuesday in Albuquerque1 while walking along some trails near the Rio Grande River. We found the most, 23, in surprise, Texas the state we spent the most time in. We found the fewest in Louisiana, just one on the way back thru and by grabbing 15 caches in Nevada we added another state cached in to bring our total to 30.

Miles and Miles and Miles

Yesterday’s anniversary got me thinking about just how many miles we’ve been in a Miata.

The original 1990 “Smurf” blue car racked up 108 thousand miles in five years before we traded it in for a new 1995 Miata. The 1995 traveled 128 thousand miles in 8 years of ownership before being traded in on a new 2003 Miata. That car stayed in the family for 13 years traveling 165,000 miles. We’ve owned the current 2002 Miata for a little more than a year and have driven it 11,000 miles. All those numbers total up to 412,000 miles of Miata fun in 28 years. Wow.

Four hundred twelve thousand divided by 28 equals almost 15,000 miles a year and at that rate we’ll reach a half a million Miata miles in the year 2023. But on further examination the trend line for Miles Per Year (MPY)is falling off. The first 5 years the average was over 21,600 MPY, the second 8 years was 16,000 MPY, the third 13 years worked out to be 12.7k MPY and for this car it is down to a under 9,000 MPY, so it might not be until 2027 we get to 500,000 miles.

Maybe I’ll start taking the long way home…