2,763 miles (12.62 gallons @ $3.059)

[August 1] So it turns out that the state of New York is absolutely huge. I know this from looking at maps, and I remember it from having driven much of its breadth once or twice, and from driving across Pennsylvania more than once, but it's easy to forget. I had not quite grasped previously how rural most of it is.

US 20 is a country highway of the sort that I imagine someone like E. B. White dragging his family across on a weekend car trip to go check something out—Niagara Falls!  The world's largest sock! A cave!—children fussing in the back whether we're there yet, having to pee, so much corn, she's on my side of the seat, license plate bingo.  It started as two lanes: Main Street for three or four towns in a row with a stoplight at the center of each, before broadening into a four-lane proto-highway complete with a soft shoulder and guardrails (and a faster speed limit)---and what's this?: a median strip!  Still with driveways thrillingly directly off the road here and postmen's trucks pulled maximally far to the side attending to mailboxes there, and thanks to the twin concrete interstates not terribly far to the north and south very little traffic.  And hills! Ten and fifteen percent grades where a modern highway would have razed hills to fill valleys. Then back to Main Street and stores, and a traffic light per town. It was like driving through the 1950's, but in a diesel Volkswagen, and with GPS.

On the way back we stopped at a Pilot station to fill back up next to the gigantic trucks, only to find that the pump nozzles were about two inches thick.  A guy filling up his old family Mercedes wagon told us that it works, but you have to dribble the gas in really slowly. “They're catering to the truckers.” Well, there was no way I was doing that, so we stopped a few dozen miles later at a rest area off of I-90, where (of course) the pump (singular) was way off to the side, where there was no credit card swiper on the pump, and where the ground was black with spilled oil (presumably).  But it filled the car in something like thirty seconds.  Easily the fastest gas pump I've ever used.

At any rate, we discovered that the satellite radio is awesome for about half an hour, after which one realizes that there are so many stations that they're all either totally generic and all over the map, thereby including entire families of music I abhor, or so completely specialized that after five songs (or was it ten? or two?) you can't tell where one song begins and the other ends.  Touching the tuning buttons on the steering wheel causes the weather info station to come on; I haven't invested the time required to set up some presets, and I likely won't. One is extra glad for the auxiliary input jack.

Putting miles on this thing pretty fast.  Guess it's fun to drive, or something.