Trip Summary and some driving notes

During our drive home, Mary and I talked about the trip.  Both of us were very impressed with the Roosevelt Museum.  For anyone interested in that era of history, you could easily spend 4-5 hours seeing  that museum.  We went through somewhat fast as we had the house tour time, and more to do that afternoon.   The other sites we visited were also quite interesting, as you read in prior posts.   And there is a lot more to see in this part of the country as we did not get to Albany or Cooperstown, among other upstate New York attractions.   So I encourage you to consider a visit to this beautiful part of New York, which is nothing like New York City.

Note: if you don't care about car stuff, you can skip the rest of this post!  After driving this 2017 Ford CMAX hybrid for 6+ years, I had never done this type of analysis so I took this opportunity to collect some data and see how effective Ford's Gas-Electric hybrid technology really is. 

The CMAX is a gas - electric hybrid (not a plug-in hybrid).  The battery charges while driving, especially when you slow down or brake.  What I liked while driving in the hills of New York and Pennsylvania is you get about 20 MPH going up a hill, but use zero gas going down any hills. All this is seamless as the starting of the gas and electric motors is handled by the electronics with no driver involvement.

If you look at my trip summary you can see we went 1593 miles, but 481 (30%) of those miles were on battery power!  My overall gas mileage was 44.1 MPG, but with a little math you can compute that when running on gas I only got 30 MPH.  Of course the hybrid technology has a much bigger effect on hilly roads (even low hills) than on pure flatlands.  So if you have an interest in improved gas mileage, I encourage you to consider a hybrid!  

That's it for this series of posts!