White knuckle ride

Susan and I finally made it back to Havasu today. I was going to drive straight through from Bakersfield to Havasu yesterday (5.5 hours, yeah…I know) but I was tired of fighting the wind. Good thing I didn’t because I guess it was pretty bad around here, like 45 mph sustained winds. We stopped at our regular stop in Yermo/Barstow and got an early start this morning. Made it almost all the way to Needles with no wind then had a good amount of wind all the way to Havasu. They say it was pretty bad around here while we were gone. Glad we missed it.

My 55 mph test came up with some interesting results. I maintained mostly 55 mph all the way to the rally. After filling up I calculated we got 8.9 mpg. Not bad but not much more than the 7.8 mpg I usually average. There is another factor here though. During this drive we didn’t tow the car. I calculated on another test drive that without the car I only picked up 0.5 mpg. So I figured running at 55 mph I only picked up 0.6 mpg. On the way back I decided to run it at 65 mph. I usually run it at around 63 mph. The results were 8.5 mpg, and this was bucking winds most of the way. So 8.5 mpg running at 65 and 8.9 mpg running at 55, not enough to slow down.