Travelogue I

Giving my new-to-me car "a proper shakedown," as Mr. Scott might say, I am driving my way down to southern California in my annual visit to see Dad and Marty over Dad's birthday. It can be done in a day and a half, and I have done, but I opted to take an extra day and take the coastal route, at least for the northern half of the trip.

Southwest Washington state is nice enough (though I could have done without the several TRUMP and REICHERT signs plastered near the roadways), but the Oregon coast is the reason for coming this way, along with the general appeal of passing through a bunch of small towns. Astoria was a nice stop, though I didn't see much of it. Driving along the north Oregon coast at night was nice, though a drawback that I hadn't thought of in advance made me question my decision: fog. Fog makes it pretty tough to appreciate the surroundings while passing through, plus it slows things down quite a bit.

Oh well, tomorrow will be Oregon in daylight, followed by a stop at Redwoods National Park for a hike, then a nighttime drive to the Bay Area and a start on the next leg of the drive.

The shakedown on the Prius is positive so far, having done some maintenance ahead of time including replacing the cabin fan, which wasn't hard and yet somehow still resulted in my bruising a rib. Not sure how that happened. But the car handles well, the cruise control got its first use since I've owned it (sweet!), the sound system is a big improvement over the old Subaru's.

I wanted to get a sense of the real mileage on the thing, but that's proving to be tricky. This generation of Prius has a kind of expandable bladder gas tank that when completely full is almost 12 gallons, but only fills to about 2/3 or 3/4 before a gas pump will stop because it's "full." So, based on info I gleaned form Prius folk on the Internet, I let the gauge get down to one pip, estimating that meant about 1 to 1.5 gallons remaining, then pumped past the "full" stop, forcing in 10 gallons plus a bit. It spit a little back out when I removed the pump thanks to the compression of the bladder, but I think I got it to actual full rather than nominally full so we'll see how far I get before the gauge goes down to one pip again.