Since moving from Indiana to southwest Florida I have to make a few trips a year to take my kids to meet their mom for vacations. We usually meet half way - which is technically Atlanta BUT that gives me a headache so after a little research we picked Montgomery, Alabama. It's a little bit longer on my end but that's OK.

Last month I took them all the way to Indianapolis, she was having car troubles. My other kids went with and from Indy we went on to Gatlinburg and then through the mountains, out in NC and home from there... but we took the Altima.

This past Saturday it was time to head to Alabama. My 8 year old daughter and I pulled out at 4:30AM and hit the road. I try to take a different route coming and going just to break it up a little so it looked a little like this

Cape Coral, FL - I75 in Punta Gorda, FL
stayed on 75 to Tifton, GA
Picked up 82 in Tifton and took it to Montgomery

Spent the night in Montgomery

Yesterday morning I got on 231 in Montgomery and took it to Interstate 10
10 to 75 and 75 the rest of the way home. Roughly 1200 miles counting stops and side trips etc. I averaged 34.6 MPG on the way there ( cruise control on - set to 70 per GPS which was 75 per speedo). I had planned on using the sunroof / windows when we got off of the interstate BUT the rain had other thoughts about that.

On the way home with all 4 of us in the car ( the other 2 are 15 and 18 ) we only averaged about 31mpg ( air and cc). Once we got on the country road to home I opened the sunroof, rolled down the windows and was going 60 per speedo - 55 per GPS) and averaged 41MPG! At least that's what the on board calc said. I got roughly 440 miles out of a full tank - I was thrilled with that. The Altima did good to get 300... and that's a 22 gallon tank.

Was a great drive, shorter than my usual efforts but we cranked up some tunes and motored on.

I've done this drive enough times that I don't really take a camera anymore... but I had my iPhone so here are a few shots.


Lulu eating breakfast


Lulu playing in traffic. I told her not to play in traffic!


Lulu playing in the rain


Lulu playing hide and seek


A few things I learned about Lulu on the trip. I've had her for a month and I hadn't really had her on the interstate too much.

Her tries don't like rain. I've been wanting to get new tires anyway but living in Florida - we have heaps of rain.

I need to get a move on getting some sort of AUX input for the radio. It has the HK system which I'm pretty happy with just need to find a way to get my music to play on it. For this trip I burnt some mix CD's but with cargo space being limited that's really not an option for future travels. I looked at GTA, even contacted them and their MINI model has been discontinued. Any thoughts on that?

My kids brought home twice what they took. I had a cooler, my stuff and my daughters stuff and that took up half of the boot. Their stuff took the other half plus over half of the front passenger's seat's leg room. Lulu was stuffed. I'm almost tempted to look into some sort of roof storage. We had a big bag type thing on our Santa Fe but it had roof racks so it just secured down with bungee or straps. The bag is a good bit too big for Lulu plus no way to secure it.

All in all I just couldn't be happier with my MINI. I've wanted one since I was much younger and when they updated them back on 02 and then they became readily available I knew my day would come... but I kept putting it off for some reason. Last year I was involved in a pretty nasty accident which made me think - now or never - on a lot of things in my life.

Another good example is visiting San Juan, PR ... I'll be there in November.

 

sweet trip to give Lulu an adventure! will you two be making that trip more times in the future?