In all, Layla and I drove some 1400 miles to get to New Mexico. Would I do it again? Perhaps, but probably not in a car like the Camry. I wouldn't mind, for example, driving the 3 for that long.
Getting out of Washington was the hardest part, in that we had to sit in traffic for around an hour before clearing Issaquah on I-90 and another hour burnt going 30 mph in a 65 zone because the fog was absolutely nutty. I suspect we cruised at that speed for at least 45 minutes.
Although I wasn't tracking fuel progress, the Camry has previously made a bit over 30mpg on the freeway. Over the 1420 miles that we went, we burned around 44 gallons of fuel, amounting to around $133 in gas. Compare this, for example, to the $275 that it cost us to fly back—and that included the gas payout for the guys that picked us up at the airport. Since the flight took us around 6 hours and the drive took around 26 total, we're seeing a net difference of $142 for 20 hours. That's $7.1/hour for the two of us, or just over $3.50/hour each. Yowch.
It really is worth it to fly. If I were to cost us out at our hourly rates (and trust me—sitting largely motionless in that car is far worse than any meeting at the office), the tickets could have been outrageously expensive before it would have been actually worth out time to drive.
In this case, it really wasn't about time—it was about getting the car to New Mexico. I hear that shipping a car between WA and NM amounts to around a grand or so, and I figure it's really really close to worth it.
That's about all I have to say about that. The picture above shows a dirty dirty Camry (although not nearly as dirty as when we arrived in New Mexico) parked somewhere nondescript in Utah.
Leave a comment