Day 1: Back on the Road!

This was a day that seems like it has taken a long time to get here, so we are REAL happy to finally be back on the road.  We officially pushed off from Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine around 9 am yesterday, after leaving Oviedo around 6:30 am.

We picked a good day to start, as Oviedo got 3" of rain and plenty of hail, thunder and lightning the night before.  We had some heavy rain come through last night, and off and on rain is forecast during the coming week.  But we managed to avoid most of the rain yesterday while we were out and about.

Alea arrives off of the ferry across the St. Johns River.

Yesterday's ride totaled about 46 miles.  Since we didn't have much chance for training rides last week, we decided to split the day, with me riding first.  I covered about 28 miles, then Alea completed the remaining 18 miles.  Her route took her on a ferry across the St. Johns River, which for a bike cost $1.  For the van and trailer would have been an additional $20, so from where she took over I headed west to the freeway, across the river and then along the river to the ferry terminal on the other side, adding about 25 miles to the day's driving.  I got there about 40 minutes before she did, and from there it was a short ride to the campground.

A salt marsh near our campsite.

We're at Little Talbot Island State Park ($27 with power and water, showers available), just for one night.  It's a bit buggy, but then this is Florida, and it is starting to be that time of year.  Ralph Martin, a fourth cousin, shared this with me recently (this seems to be more commonly attributed to Texas, but I suspect it applies to a good part of the sunbelt):

Bless this house, oh God, we cry.

  Please keep it cool in mid-July.

Bless the walls where termites dine,

  While ants and roaches march in time.

Bless our yard where spiders pass

  Fire ant castles in the grass.

Bless the garage, a home to please

  Carpenter bees, ticks and fleas.

Bless the love bugs, two by two,

  The gnats and mosquitoes that feed on you.

Millions of creatures that fly and crawl,

  In Florida, God, you've put them all.

But this is home, and here we'll stay,

  So thank you God, for insect spray.

FUEL ECONOMY

We've been curious about the sort of mileage that we get in our 2016 Ford Transit Connect cargo van, though we know we had averaged around 23 mpg over the several thousand miles that we drove last year (the van now has a little over 16,000 miles on it).  So we reset the fuel economy calculator to get a better idea.  The winds were very light, so they didn't have much effect on fuel economy.

For the first hour our highway speeds were from 45 to 55 mph.  At first there were lots of stops, then a long uninterrupted stretch.  By the time we reached the freeway, our fuel economy was 28.5 mpg and slowly edging upward.

The second hour was on the freeway traveling at 70 mph.  The mileage steadily declined to 22.9 mpg before holding steady.  Once we got off the freeway and drove to the Castillo on city streets, the mileage improved slightly.

Later, when driving on the freeway at 65 mph, the fuel economy slowly improved from our overall average for the day (up to that time) of 23.1 mpg.

That's pretty consistent with what the folks at Camp Inn had told us - that fuel economy is optimized at 60 mph and declines after that.   It was good to see the fuel economy so good when driving between 45 and 55, as that is typically the sort of speeds we average on the secondary roads that we usually travel on.  Of course that was in Florida, where it is generally flat as a pancake.  With a mix of mountainous roads the 23 mpg average that we experienced last year should be about what we should expect going forward.