1,624 miles (12.93 gallons @ $2.999)

One of the things about diesel pumps at most gas stations is that they won't turn on unless you go inside the station first and ask the pump to be turned on, which seems ridiculous until you realize that it's only because they mostly don't have credit card readers on the diesel pumps.  Not sure why this is, but it's annoying to have to make two trips in.  On the other hand, after having spent all but five of my previous waking minutes this morning driving back from the beach I didn't mind the break quite so much.  I had originally left with the temperature in the mid 60's, which is far cooler than anything I've felt outside in most of a month.  It was great—I had the windows and the sunroof open, no bugs or oppressive humidity, no other traffic that early, nothing on the stereo—and then after about fifteen minutes I rounded a corner and the temperature shot up ten degrees, and the sun came out from behind a cloud…so I closed everything up and turned the AC back on.  Someday I'll get to drive the thing wide open without getting so sweaty that I can't go to work.  Alas.

I've officially managed to transport my bike and a bunch of lumber and such in the back of the car with the seats partly folded down, and the noise is pretty much no different than with everything wide open. I've nevertheless been contemplating a roof rack of some kind. The car has rails, but no crossbars and no attachments, and this was intentional; if I'm going to buy a roof rack, I want at least to be able to remount it on another car someday.  To that end, I've been pricing out Thule and Yakima racks.  Holy crap, those things are expensive.  Maybe the existing strategy of just strapping the kayaks (on pads on towels) directly to the roof will have to suffice for a bit longer.  Or just leave them at the beach.  In the meantime, we'll see how long it takes me to scratch the hell out of the paint getting the bike in and out of the car.  Probably not long.

The car is averaging about 39 miles per gallon overall since I bought it, which is kind of amazing given the amount of commuting and traffic-sitting included in that figure.

So now is a good time to point out that I'm not one of those people that names cars.  Those people are crazy.

 

1,067 miles (12.9 gallons @ $3.039)

So I had forgotten how much filling a car with diesel reminds me of squirting WD-40 in a confined space. Luckily, I find the smell of WD-40 quite nice for brief periods. It reminds me of being sixteen and driving to Sugarbush, and of riding with my father to Dartmouth on a school vacation day for a day of screwing around on the pre-internet networked Macs.

The Hess station in Allston doesn't have the self-pay mechanism on the pump, so I had to go inside and wait twice in line to pay. The pump is one of those old school varieties with no vapor collection meta-nozzle around the nozzle, and when the tank was almost full it made a scary diesel-about-to-splash-all-over-your-clothes noise. I second guessed myself about having stopped too early and had vague thoughts that I have become a suburban pantywaist as regards filling vehicles with diesel fuel, but this tank consisted mostly of highway driving, and seems genuinely to have averaged over 40 miles a gallon: the gauge reads Full. The mileage would have been quite a bit higher had I driven more slowly, or not up and down the mountains of I-89.

We learned that an adult and two car seats can fit in the back, albeit tightly. (Why in the hell are cars made in such a way that children under 12 are somehow unsafe riding in them?) We also learned that our combined eight years of post-graduate education is insufficient for using the media system for anything but the most basic listening; putting a CD in is completely out of the question while driving. Alas.

540 miles (14.1 gallons @ $3.309; full serve)

The car has a manual (6-speed) transmission, which is surprisingly tolerable despite all the stop-and-go traffic. I bought the car black, which is fine, with a black interior, which was kind of stupid because it gets hot. There is a large sunroof and an auxiliary input jack for playing the iPod through the (fairly nice) stereo. It is a station wagon.

There is a trip computer between the tachometer and the speedometer, directly above the steering column and visible through the wheel, that tells me my gas mileage over the last couple of seconds, and this turns driving into a game. I mostly turn it off in dense traffic. I have not yet crashed into anyone.

This tank of gas includes one medium-length highway trip, but is mostly me commuting.

I will need to find self-serve diesel somewhere near work.