For your next trip OR as the start to your evacuation planning you have to know how much fuel you will need if you are driving. How far will you be traveling? [Break this down into days or legs with planned rest stops.]

To estimate this you will need to know what your current gas mileage is. You should be tracking your mileage anyway along with the oil and other fluids used in your vehicle.

Every time that you get fuel, log it into your travel records along with your odometer reading. Then divide the miles traveled by amount of fuel used = miles per gallon.

Example I drove 350 miles and used 21 gallons = 16.7 miles per gallon.

Take the projected total miles you plan to travel and divide that figure by your current mileage, the result will be the projected number of gallons fuel you may consume for the trip. ADD 10% for variance and safety aka fudge factor.

To keep things simple enough so that even I can understand it.

My current vehicle gets 10 miles to the gallon of gas in town [actually it is closer to 17 miles to the gallon but that is harder to do the math]. The miles per gallon –mpg- that we get out on the highway is 20 [actually we get closer to 23 mpg].

Total projected round trip miles is 2,000. So the problem is set up as,

Total projected trip miles / mpg
=_____ fuel amount needed.

We always plan for the worse mileage so that we can take side trips if we see or hear about fun stuff while we are gallivanting about.

How far do you plan to cover during each day or leg of your trip?

Back when we were much younger we would split the driving between 2 or 3 adults and we would cover 1,200 miles in a day [24 hours] so that we would have more time at our destination.

Realistically if you are going to see stuff along the way and be a tourist don’t expect to cover more than about 300 miles a day IF that. And plan way stations along your route.

As an example one year a friend from our military days was visiting from ‘back east’. At the end of his visit I took him to the state capitol to catch the Amtrak train home.

The drive was planned to take 2.5 hours with a planned detour of 4 hours to a park along the way. The park is a natural rock bridge that had been carved over the centuries by a large creek.

The park portion had several hiking trails and there were those standing BBQ cook areas with picnic tables that were comfortable for the lunch we had packed.

The site was / is very beautiful and has a rich history as an oasis for the local American Indians. One of the pluses is that it is well protected from the wind. Some of the other features included more than enough fresh water for the tribe and their animals. There are several apple trees which are reputed to have been planted by the Indians. Game such as fish, deer, rabbits and birds are plentiful. I didn’t have time to search very hard but there were many edible plants such as Purslane, plantain, cattails, milkweed and burdock.

I can really see why the Indians would tarry there and perhaps even a good place to settle in the general area.

Round trip was about 400 miles and took less than a tank of gas. Total time away from home was under 12 hours

That was a brief example of a travel journal entry.

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