4,561 miles (14.13 gallons @ $2.949)
[September 5] On the summer’s last trip down to vacationland I had both kids in the back, both behaving reasonably well and drinking juice boxes without making a complete hash of the leather seats—although the seats are black, so what the hell?—and saying funny things and requesting good music (Billy Bragg and Wilco, Apples In Stereo, and They Might Be Giants, I believe it was), and in order to avoid what looked like a catastrophic backup of some kind we had left the main highway for the state road that wound through three or four coastal towns. This meant short, gently rolling hills at speeds between 35 and 60 miles an hour with plenty of gear shifting and engine braking, and without having the engine wound out too much. And it turns out that this is exactly how Volkswagens are meant to be driven. The car and I couldn’t have been happier except if the kids had been willing to drive with the windows down; we had to settle for having the sunroof and rear windows cracked.
At any rate, it got to be time to fill the tank, whereupon I noticed that the car had been averaging (!) something like 52 miles a gallon since leaving home. This with basically no attention paid to fuel efficiency on the whole trip save for having squealed the tires in second gear getting onto the highway just as we had left—the driver in front of me stopped, god damn it, in order to merge into full-speed Interstate highway traffic—and even so we had done absurdly well. I got a few drops of diesel fuel on my fingers and the solventy smell lasted at least an hour. What a nice little car.
Annoying fact: bugs are beginning to collect in the windscreen mesh in front of the sunroof, which won’t be fun to clean.