Our van, "God bless her, her ways, her mysterious ways," has just rolled 220,000 miles!  Phew!

So our van, in it's day of 1993, was the bomb and tripped out with all kinds of novelties, one of which is the gem that is it's gas mileage gauges*. 

It has...

1. A trip meter
2. An average miles per gallon (mpg) meter
3. A second by second mpg meter
4. An average miles left in tank meter

What does this mean? 

It means brilliance!  Josh and I have decided that if all cars made had these gems of features, people would save a ton of money and there would be a lot less speeding.  It means a challenge!  You can moment by moment tell how much gas you are using and work your speed to get more out of each gallon.  It means we love our van!  Didn't see that one coming did ya?  It means that east coast senator isn't smoking crack!  The one who said we need to research making the speed limit 55mph again... yea, that guy, he may be onto something.

Our favorite meter is the one that does the second by second mpg.  When you go up hills it goes way down, 18- mpg, when you go down hills it goes way up 44+ mpg.  Now for the averages...

If I travel 55-60 mph I get 35-40 mpg.  If I travel 65-70 mph I get 25-30 mpg.  If I travel 70-72 I get 22-23 mpg.  If I travel 75+ I get 18- mpg and a possible ticket.  AND If I travel behind a big truck at 70-72 mph (and as proven I hear on Myth Busters) I get 44-49 mpg.

I worked the system our whole 1815 mile trip.  Well... except this one point, after we drove from MN to IA and I was then driving back up to MN.  I started getting grumpy, and well, started driving a bit faster and ruined my average down to 22.8 mpg.  BUT I made up for it on our drive home and by the end of our trip we had a 23.0 mpg average on our cherry of a 1993, 6 cylinder minivan... amazing! 

We also decided that we needed to install an optional paddle boat type of pedal system that is installed into each seat's flooring so that when we are doing things like going up hills we can flip out the pedals for one and all to help out get some additional power going to stop the general decline in mpg that inevitably happens on hills.

We came up with a few other brilliant ideas but they are true brilliance and well, we're gonna save those for another day's business adventure.

All in all, this only truly proves one thing... we love our van!

Again, didn't see that one coming did you?

*Since we just replaced the battery before our trip we know they were all recently reset.  HOWEVER, this all assumes that gauges are accurate which really, who knows... but we're pretty sure they are.  AND, this is still low gas mileage compared to our Camry which got, no joke, 40 mpg on road trips!