Getting From Here To There By The Numbers

I’ll be spending the Thanksgiving week with my family over near Dallas Texas at my brother‘s and sister’s-in-law house. According to Mapquest it’s 1,368.87 miles from my home to their home (exact addresses utilized). Mapquest estimated the time to drive that at 21 hours and 11 minutes. In order to drive that number of miles in that estimated time I would have to drive an average of 64.6 MPH. That won’t happen. I typically use a base average of 60 MPH when I estimate how long it will take for me to drive from here to there on long road trips. It takes into account my average highway speeds as well as various stops along the way for gas, food, drink, bathroom, etcetra. So at 60 MPH it would take me nearly 23 hours to drive from Homestead Florida to Allen Texas – minus an hour for the time difference – so that’s 22 hours. That would be a two-day event – and not half on one day and half on the next day either. I don’t think that I would want to drive 11 hours in one day and then 11 hours the next day, but I think that I could drive perhaps 15 or 16 hours on the first day and then the remaining 6 or 7 hours on the second day. That would create an overnight hotel stay somewhere in Louisiana on the way over, and near Lake City Florida on the way back home.

How much would the 2,737.74 mile round-trip cost in gas alone ?  I estimate that gas will actually drop down to the $3.50 per gallon level by Thanksgiving week. So at 30 MPG that’s a little more than 91 gallons for a total cost of not quite $320.

Round-trip airfare between Miami and Dallas will cost more than that. In fact I checked earlier today, and had I booked the round-trip flight that I really wanted it would have cost me over $600 !  Right. I’ll wait a bit until that drops down into the $400s. I don’t book my airfare based on the lowest round-trip cost on the cheapest airline. I book it based on the exact flight that I want. I just wait for the cost of that specific flight to drop down to a reasonable level. Airfares fluctuate daily, so I’ll be monitoring it regularly.

I’ll probably fly to Dallas for Thanksgiving week, but some day I will drive the miles. When I do that I’ll take my time and explore places along the way. There are a lot of cool things for me to see between here and there !