Feb 2024 PNW road trip - by the numbers

Distance

My trip began in Fort Collins, CO, where I'd stayed with a friend on Sunday night. My first stop was in Boise, ID at an AirBnB. This was about 700 miles, and the whole travel day took about 12 hours. I'm honestly not sure why, in retrospect - Google Maps estimates the time at 9:41, and the other two legs of the journey that were estimated in that range were both finished in ~10. So I added two hours somewhere and I don't know where or why XD

The second leg, Tuesday, was another 760 miles, going from Boise to Eugene, OR; I went a long route on this to make the drive along the Columbia Gorge, I-84 across Oregon and through/past Portland. Google Maps estimates this at 11 hours, and I think that was about right.

I spent Wednesday in Eugene recovering from that mini marathon of a drive.  On Thursday, I went up to Portland, starting at Marquam Nature Park - about 115 miles.  I toodled around Portland a bit before heading to my AirBnB in Vancouver, WA.

Friday, I drove up to Seattle to meet an online friend. For estimation purposes, I dragged the pin for this trip a ways north of where I actually ended up because, as a future post will detail, I had some car problems that took me a ways north of downtown Seattle. So, we'll call it 176 miles. That evening, I drove to a motel in Moses Lake, WA to reduce the next two days' drive. That was another 177 miles.

Saturday took me from Moses Lake through northern Idaho, a bit of Montana, and back into Idaho, ending at an AirBnB in Shelley (near Idaho Falls). 623 miles on the board.

Finally, Sunday coursed through Idaho, back to Wyoming, and finally returning to Estes Park, CO, where I lived at the time of the trip.  Just under 600 miles.

Plugging the whole trip into Google, using some rough place markers and some exact, is a total of about 3,000 miles.

Finances

I spent three nights in AirBnBs and one night in a motel. Total ~227.
My car got surprisingly good gas mileage, better than expected, putting me at a total of ~285 in gas.
Pretty much everything else is just getting slushed together, because breaking food away from fun is difficult in most areas (with a few exceptions). And I might be including one or two non-trip-related grocery stops in this. But the rough total on that is 307. Breaking that across the 6 days (Monday to Sunday) is only ~$51/day. Obviously, road days were much less overall, as most of my food on those days was efficient road snacks and picnic-esque meals, all grocery store and much of it planned for low cost. Hell, my Seattle day was $24 parking, $22 tour I did, and $33 dining, so that kinda warps the average a bit.

Putting the total cost of the trip at $819.

Some cocktail napkin math: my car has about an 18 gallon tank. At an average gallon price of 3.09 (higher in OR/WA, lower in ID/WY, seems like a decent average), it costs about $56 to fill it. With $285 spent on gas, that means I went through about 5 tanks of gas, covering 3,000 miles. 600 per tank, about 33mpg.

So. Yeah. Those are the numbers.