Yosemite 2016 Trip - Statistics

        Total Trip


Total Days 9
Days on the Road 9
Total Miles 2293
Average Miles/Day 255
Low Mileage Day 52
High Mileage Day 377

        Gas and Mileage


Total Gas Stops 17
Total Gallons 64.6
Total Gas Cost $171.75
Average Miles/Gallon 35.53
Average Cost/Gallon $2.66
Low Cost/Gallon $2.399 - Myrtle Creek, OR
High Cost/Gallon $3.599 - El Portal, CA

        General


Total States Visited 4
Total National Parks Visited 2
Total National Monuments Visited 0
Lowest Temperature 43.3°
Highest Temperature 113.2°
Lowest Elevation -27'
Highest Elevation 9,994'
Days with Rain 1
Nights in Motels 8
Average Cost/Night $156.20
Low Cost Night $86.24
High Cost Night $209.79
Wireless Connections 8
Wired Connections 0
Telephone Connections 0

Web Statistics


I didn't look at the web statistics since I didn't share the links with anyone and didn't even complete all of the pages until after we returned home. These pages are really for our own good anyway so I'm not that concerned with  how many people view or follow our pages anyway.

Final Thoughts and Plans

This was the tenth motorcycle trip that we documented on our site.  This was also the second trip on the new trike. The trike ran great not that I expected any different. The Goldwing is up to 97,000 miles and continues to run great. We were on the road 9 days which is the same as last year. The only rain we had was the last couple of hours from Ellensburg into Seattle.

Speaking of the Goldwing, we got much better mileage this year than last year - probably due to the fact that we spent less time on freeways and more time at lower speeds on lesser used highways. We averaged better than 35.5 miles per gallon on this trip which was definitely acceptable. The only really bad mileage day was coming over Snoqualmie Pass the last day. I really had to go 70 plus miles per hour to keep up with traffic. That combined with the cold and rain just did us in. The reserve light came on somewhere on I-405 but we decided to keep going since we calculated that we had plenty of gas left if the Goldwing capacities were correct. This worked out fine since, when I finally filled the tank, we had about .7 gallons left - enough for 20+ more miles. Besides all that, we had purchased a 1 gallon Rotopax gas container which fit very easily in the trike trunk. This will be a great addition for future trips. We'll know that, even if the reserve light comes on, we could feasibly go 60 or 70 additional miles if worse came to worse. There have been several times over the years that we held our breath hoping to make it to the next gas station.

I really like the Fillup Android App which I use to track the mileage on my truck. I can define a new vehicle - I called it Yosemite - and track the gas usage and mileage for the entire trip. This is much easier than trying to write down the data each time and keeps a running average of gas mileage. We also used Google Maps several times to find someplace and give us directions if necessary - very cool. Occasionally we also used the Garmin Nuvi 550 for similar purposes. The Nuvi has a feature that we can zero out the trip mileage and then it keeps track of the statistics for the entire trip. At the end of the trip is showed that we had the GPS on for 50:13 hours and of that 47:41 was moving and 2:32 was stopped. It also showed a maximum speed of 74 miles per hour but then showed a total trip miles of 13088.9 miles which just doesn't seem to be correct.

The last trip we had some intermittent problems with the Roady2 XM radio and I re-soldered the sound output jack after that trip. I only had to switch to the hardware jack once during the trip but it worked fine that time. The rest of the time we used the built-in modulator and had no problems with that either. We did keep the sound off the entire time we were in the park since we just wanted to enjoy the scenery.

The last trip we had camera problems. The backup battery that keeps the date and time seems to have failed and so the camera kept losing the time. This is a problem because the program we use (Robogeo) to geocode the photos to the route map uses the time from the camera EXIF data for this purpose. There is some other problem with the camera also since, when the camera is left just sitting, the main battery runs down completely. That being the case we went ahead and purchased a new camera for this trip. We ended up with a Nikon Coolpix S7000. The camera has a 20X zoom and worked fine. We also took several pictures with our phones - Motorola Moto G 3rd Generation - since they take great pictures as well. Unfortunately there were low clouds and smoke much of the trip so many of the pictures didn't come out as well as we would like - not much we could do about that.

We only had one minor problem during the trip. The bracket that clamped Linda's headset cord to her helmet cracked and we had to reinforce it with plastic electrical tape. The fix worked great and we had no problems with the bracket for the rest of the trip. The same thing happened to me a few trips ago. Although our helmet headsets are quite old, I was still able to purchase a hardware repair kit at the time for mine and just ordered another kit for Linda's.

I worked on the temperature logging after the last couple of trips but don't have it right yet. As soon as you stop, the temperature starts to climb because of the heat radiated from the engine. I think I have it figured out now and will work on the programming in the next few weeks. I hope I can get it right this time. Other than that we had no major problems with the logging with the exception of about a half hour on the last day coming over the pass. The display and logger locked up for about a half hour due to the heavy rain that occurred during the ride over the pass. The problem was obviously moisture but I'm not sure if the water got in from the top of the display unit or splashed up from underneath. I may look into re-sealing it for the next trip and possibly look for something to spray on the board to provide some water resistance. We lost GPS logging for that time frame but I found a really cool program that let me add intermediate points to the log to match the route. The program was GPS Track Editor and has lots of great features and is free - what more could you ask for.

This trip we paid the most for hotel rooms. Part of this was our choice to stay at better places and part of it was high prices around Yosemite where there aren't a lot of choices.

Well that's about it for this trip. We're really hoping for Alaska next year since that's the only state we haven't ridden in yet. We would only be going to the Southern tip of Alaska which happens to be Hyder.  We'll see...

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