Here are a couple pictures of our trip - the first is just a general overview of the US but the second is a detailed map of our drive. You can zoom in on it to see the cities we drove through. It was quite a few! We also figure we drove through 16 different states, but we'll let you count and verify. As we mentioned in the last post, we ended up driving around 6800 miles (the itinerary was around 6500 and then we obviously did quite a bit of driving at each of our stops). You can see a few pictures from our trip in the all-new Summer Trip 2009 photo album.
The MDX did magnificantly! We were curious while still in Hawaii to get it to the mainland and see how it would do during long drives on open roads. We never drove it for longer than 30 minutes at a time on Oahu! Anyhow, the MDX was great. It ran like a deer, was comfortable and cool, was perfectly sized for our mobile kitchen in the back, and got much better gas mileage than we're used to. Just to be sure, a day or two before we left for our trip I took it to an auto shop here in PDX and had it looked up and down, all the fluids topped off, and even had new brake pads installed. Then I took it to a car wash and had it cleaned inside and out before we started living in it for a month. So, we started out in top condition. Then along the way various family members topped fluids off and give things a quick inspection to ensure we were still runnning well.
The only issue we had with the MDX was the car battery died a couple times. It died three times in Virginia and then once more in Colorado. We suspect it's because we had so much drawing off it - both our GPS and our XM satelite radio - because we didn't have problems with the battery as long as we unplugged those things before we tried to restart the car after a stop. So Kathy's dad put in a new car battery while we were staying with them in Bayfield and we haven't had any problems with it since. The old battery was 5 years old so it was time to be replaced anyway.
The other close calls we had with the MDX during our trip were all results of operator errors, specifically how often we waited to gas up until the last possible minute! In fact, the closest call we had on our entire trip was only 11 miles from home on the last day of our trip! We couldn't believe that we had made it thousands of miles only to run out of gas 20 minutes from home! To make a long (and stressful) story short, we eventually found a little country store with one rusty old gas pump with 0 miles left on our odometer! We felt like Kramer test driving that new car until it ran out of gas to see how far below "Empty" the needle would go! Fortunately we filled up and made it home without ever having actually run out of gas!


