Drill Baby Drill

February 27, 2023 — Day 12

We woke early, very early by the clock, and earlier still by our body clocks. We’re still on East Coast time. Loaded up, closed up and headed west. Today was going to be the big miles day. We wanted to make El Paso.

The winds were a concern, overnight the weather forecast was for 45mph with gusts to 85mph north of where we were traveling. I was thinking we should pull out before dawn, before the sun’s heat would make more wind.

But overnight the forecast for Monday got ever so slightly better so we headed out early, but not 4AM early.

The terrain was what I thought Texas would be, almost. I thought it would be flatter. Remember a few days ago how wet it was. Now it was dry, this is what we were driving through.

There were prickly pears everywhere, and we were starting to see yucca. Susan was driving and yelled, “A Goat!” Sure enough, there was a goat. The funny thing was she first thought it was a trash bag. The South West is covered in plastic crap, it is disgusting how messy this place is. So she thought it was a white plastic bag moving with the wind. Then she saw the ears!

“A goat!”

They have trains out here. Big trains, hauling your Amazon crap, or lettuce, or maybe vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate and isobutylene. Not that that would happen. But there are a lot of trains. They’re actually kind of cool.

So what’s up with the the blog title, Drill Baby Drill?

Crossing from Junction Texas to El Paso is about gas. Certain people reading this will remember the muscle cars they had in the 60’s or 70’s. Maybe it was small block Chevy in a Nova, or an AMC Hurst S/C Scrambler.

But what they had in common was dreadful gasoline consumption.

Today was about that, but we’re not driving a muscle car, we’re driving a Subaru Ascent towing a 4,000 lb trailer.

And the speed limit is 80mph

I’m doing 70 in an 80 zone. (Don’t worry, Susan took the picture.) This has gas milage implications.

Towing we get around 11mpg in New England. We’re driving 55 or 60 and it is hilly. We got 12.5mpg in Maryland because it is flat.

It is hilly here and fast. Over a 100 mile run I averaged 6.8mpg. Now, we have an 18 or 19 gallon tank and, if you remember from a few days ago, we ran out and don’t want to run out again. That’s a 120 mile range. Now… we’re in the middle of nowhere and gas station are few and far between. We stopped for gas every 80 to 100 miles.

We stopped for gas 5 times and got gas 4 times. (One station was out of gas.) That might seem like a high number, but when was the last time you filled up 4 times in one day? It seemed like all we did was either drive or, if you were the navigator, use the Garmin GPS, Apple Maps, or even Google to find gas stations.

I thought I’d drop the speed to see if the gas milage got better, but I saw, on the GPS, that we were starting a 30 mile climb from about 2,700 feet to 4,500 feet. We got under 5mpg on that run.

So back to the muscle car, you got a better deal, you got to have this!

How much did we spend? We’re in the middle of nowhere, so it isn’t $2.79/gallon. We paid $3.99/gallon at one spot, when you’re the only gas around, you charge for it. Total spent was $29, $59, $36, and $39. I’m not going to add that up and if you do, don’t tell me.

Ok, Susan did some math. $0.34/mile. OMG!

Somewhere between Junction and El Paso we got a call from our good friends Howard and Barb! They were stopping by the house at our request to look at the heating system. It had been maintaining 61 degrees perfectly flat and then it dropped to 57 and was bouncing all over the place. We were concerned that the mini-splits had failed and we were using the backup oil heat (Drill baby drill!) That’s ok except for two things, we might need to buy more oil. Plus the oil burner has a tendency to not start. No biggie it’s a back up system. Which is fine when you’re home. Even finer when you’re home heating with pellets and the mini splits are back up. When you’re not home? Not so much., which is ok when you’re home and not ok when you’re not home! So thank you both!

Soon Texas was looking like Texas was supposed to look.

Hey look, I can see Mexico from here!

We drove past El Paso to a little town in New Mexico named Anthony. There we found our next Harvest Host, The Public House 28 Brewery. What a nice little establishment. Susan had an IPA and I had a Porter, we both enjoyed them.

We also really enjoyed the view!

New Mexico is really a pretty state, I can see why I almost moved here about 15 or so years ago.

We had a quick dinner of raviolis and the water started sputtering while I was cleaning up. This was not good. When we left Morgan Shady I dumped about 6 gallons down the drain, we have a 28 gallon tank and 6 gallons of water in the hot water heater’s tank. I wanted to try and keep the trailers weight down, the forecast was still windy you see. I also took 2 gallons out and moved it forward to the front of the trailer. But we had used some for cooking and cleaning and other normal uses and now we were out!

We had hoped to “boondock”, which is camping without hookups, the next day but this was not going to be possible. We tried to find a reasonably priced campground, no luck, we tried to find expensive ones, no luck.

So, like all good adventurers, we went to bed.

Daily: 479, yes, 479!

Total: 3,059.

Miles/Day: 254 miles/day