Longview TX

Yesterday, Sunday, we headed north out of La Grange about 9am and rode an all-too-rare tailwind pretty much all the way to the Longview area... a distance just shy of 260 miles. We're parked at Fernbrook RV Park just south of I-20 and decided to spend two nights here to give the weather a chance to clear a little. The predicted morning a line of thunderstorms showed up right on time and produced some heavy downpours followed by a drop in temps from the mid 70s to the mid 50s... and strong gusty winds the rest of the afternoon. We simply hunkered down and let it pass; a perfect day for getting some long delayed inside work done.

Tuesday looks like a good travel day so we'll bite-off the next chunk of the journey and try to get to the Little Rock area... and one of our favorite Corps of Engineers campgrounds. Current plans have us holding up there for a few days.

Along the way tomorrow I'll be looking for a few gallons of diesel fuel. The last diesel we purchased was on our way into the Coastal Bend during the first couple days of January... think we paid about 3.16/gallon. I noticed the going price along our path yesterday was 3.90/gallon.

That got me thinking about fuel efficiency. I heard a recent ad on the radio... about how long-haul trains can move a ton of cargo almost 500 miles on a gallon of fuel. So how does our little Focus do in this regard? Here's the math: we get an average of about 35 miles per gallon. The car weighs a little over 3000 pounds (1.5 ton) with the two of us aboard. So it moves a ton and a half 35 miles on one gallon... or, for the same comparison metric... it'll move one ton 53 miles on one gallon.

And how does the big bad inefficient bus-house do? Let's see... we get 8 miles per gallon... and the bus-house weighs a little more than 32,000 pounds (or 16 tons) as we're moving down the road. So if one gallon moves 16 tons 8 miles, then one gallon will move one ton 128 miles. Hmmm. On a simple fuel used per ton moved basis, the bus-house is more than twice as efficient as the high-mileage Ford Focus.  Don't ask me to explain this... I've been over it a dozen times.