Road Trip: The 6 M's

First some numbers:

I have travelled 8,855 miles in 50 days.
That means I am averaging 177.1 miles per day in the car.
I have been averaging 46.5 miles per gallon.
Thus, I have used 190.4 gallons of fuel.
I estimate that I have averaged paying about $2.95 per gallon of gas. I have paid as much as $3.71 per gallon, but that was a remote area. The price has been steadily rising all across the country.
With those numbers, it means that I have spent about $562 for fuel. Pretty cheap I think for what I have seen. (Actuaries MFox and B-girl and CPA's Buz and Sis, feel free to crunch these numbers and confirm that I did the math right.)
I have been doing this for 7 weeks, but I have spent 2 full weeks in Phoenix, and 1 week in San Francisco, 3 days in Chicago, and 4 days in New Orleans. Outside of that, on real Road Trip days, I put between 300 and 500 miles on the odometer.
When staying in hotels, I have been paying between $45 and $200 a night, with an average somewhere around $80 a night. Hotel prices can fluctuate wildly based on many factors.
ORBC went up $2.22 on the NASDAQ Friday. C was up $0.22. As I now have an annual salary of $0.00, anything helps. A wild guess estimate is that I am spending about $200 a day so far. I estimate I could probably keep Road Tripping for 2 or 3 years before being truly destitute. I have previously stated that I plan to do this through August, but as of now, I am enjoying it so much, and have so much more I want to do, I think I might need to add September into the mix. (Sorry Mom).
I have been in 19 states (NJ, PA, OH, WV, KY, IN, IL, MO, AR, MI, LA, TX, NM, AZ, CO, UT, CA, NY, CT). Of those, for me, the states I had never been to before are MO, AR, TX, AZ, UT. Just been in one country so far, unless the walk across the Rio Grande in TX to Mexico counts...it doesn't count for me.
When travelling, I average about 5 hours of sleep a night, and find I am fully functional on about 4. A year ago, I would never be able to believe I could make a statement like that.
It takes me between 20 minutes and 4 hours to create a blog entry. It depends on what I did during the day, how inspired I am, and what is on TV while writing the blog.
I smile 92.4 percent of the time. Otherwise, I am sticking food into my mouth. (I can't even guess the average price of food, and will eventually use my credit card receipts to get a better picture.
Speaking of pictures, I have taken and uploaded somewhere around 750 pictures. There are a few more that I have taken and not posted for various reasons, but for the most part, they're all there to be viewed. I found out that Buz and a few other regular readers had no idea that there are more photos on the website below the previous posts links. So if you haven't seen it yet, on the right side of the blog, you can see a list with links like "Day 45" that are additional photos beyond the few I post inside the regular blog posts.
I have a funky counter on the blog that tells me that people look at my blog more on Mondays than any other day of the week, and practically nobody looks at my blog during the weekend. Last Sunday, 19 unique people clicked on my blog. Last Monday, 52 people did. The most ever was 68. I think I know almost everyone who logs on other than about a dozen or so that are out there lurking and I assume a bunch of them are "bots" trolling for credit card numbers or the like.
Yesterday I was 38. Today I am 39. Thanks Mom and Dad for starting me on this longer journey. Thanks Aunt Sue for never missing sending me a birthday card.

There are a few other numbers I am forgetting that I wanted to add to a post about numbers, but as I said, I am forgetting the ones I want to add. I'll update them as I remember them

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On to today. I headed out of Old Saybrook leaving the wedding festivities behind. It being Memorial Day, I was re-routed around the town's parade and was forced to take the back roads along the Long Island Sound. The east coast holds some beautiful scenery also, and this was an area I had never been to.

I arrived at my 4 nieces house around noon. It was opening day at the swim club, so I pulled on my brothers bathing suit and joined them for a swim, splash, dive and flip. It was also the opening weekend of summer for their club and every family that has kids was there to take advantage of the extravagant festivities, the highlight for the kids being the bouncy moon walk and poofy slide.

Their dinner was a BBQ buffet with a dozen slaws and side salads that were enough of an excellent meal all by themselves, but they also had the standard burgers and dogs accompanied by some pretty good salmon, ribs, 3 types of chicken, corn on the cob, and mozzarella sticks that my sister-in-law has a particular fondness for. As far as buffets go, it was first class.

I kept the nieces up late reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azekban. I am truly blessed with 5 perfect nieces and 1 awesome nephew. Another number for you - Total diapers I have changed in my life: 0.