Fuel for Thought

Roll Up Your Pants

I drive by Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma often without stopping. This week the lake was about the highest I've seen, so I stopped at a town that I use as a gauge for my own eye-ball drought measurement. The town of Crowder is just off of US Highway 69 and has a small community park on the lake and is part of the highway scenery. For my drought measurements I note how far the boat docks are stranded out of the water and how much of an old road reappears from the depths of the cove that the park sits on. An old man stopped by to see what I was doing. He said the lake has only been this high three times in the last thirty years. The Army Corps of Engineers shows the water level about three feet below the top of flood stage and twelve feet above normal.

The above looks west across a parking lot and boat ramp. In the photo below, I would be standing next to the cars in the parting lot.

Some of the weather during the past couple weeks that topped off the lakes in Oklahoma and Texas.

Fuel economy. On my way to Dallas from St Louis I averaged 21 mpg at 55 mph with headwind, heavy rain and air conditioner running. The return trip saw 22.1 mpg with the speed bumped up to 60 mph, light tailwind, and air conditioning.

GPS miles. In the past people questioned the miles from some of my route quotes. This time I remembered to record my mileage from both odometer and gps. On the out trip the gps recorded 75 less miles than the odometer for a 650 mile run. For the return trip the gps recorded two miles less than the odometer. Hopefully, the military and NASA aren't using Garmin algorithms.

eb