3,308 miles (12.87 gallons @ $3.099)

So this car easily gets mileage in the high 40's, if only you can manage to drive conservatively and keep your speed between 60 and 70 miles per hour. Around here this is essentially impossible to do, but I was driving back from vacationland the other night and decided that it was probably safer than trying to maintain my already too-high speed.  That, and I was too hepped up from listening to the Red Sox lose to the Yankees, which is marginally tolerable during the regular season when Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy nurse us through the experience but which I cannot stand while having to simultaneously listen to the clown on Fox Sports—is it McCarver? It has to be McCarver—the one who constantly talks, sentence fragments tumbling after one another in a uniform drip, the intonation always the same, like a post-op Dora the Explorer, horrible bits of half-information that Don and Jerry already told us earlier in the season, other futile and inane attempts not to fumble the riffs handed him by his color men or by the managers as he interviews them, all the while getting way too excited when someone gets a hit—a hit! a hit!—or steals second!—so I got in the car and drove home. I tried listening to the game on the radio but my disposition toward it was already fouled, so I turned it off and listened to the car while I drove it hyperefficiently. It sounds nice, and there are no rattles. Averaged 48 on the way home.

The car is a Volkswagen, which means that I've been expecting The Smell to kick in at any moment. In the dim recesses of my mind is a snippet of an old Car Talk episode wherein the boys describe The Volkswagen Problem, which is that they eventually begin to smell for some probably condensation-related reason. Mine has seen a lot of humidity this summer, and has had the air conditioning running a lot, and now that the overpowering new leather smell has begun to fade ever so slightly there's something different about the aroma compared with the other car. I desperately hope that this is not The Smell. I shall keep this space apprised.