(written on the 6th from notes taken previously)
Good day today. Back on the road again, but I’ll get to that.
I was up relatively early, and I spent a little time playing hymns on my guitar. It’s Fast Sunday today, but I wasn’t quite prepared for it, so I went ahead and drank some protein this morning (for any readers who are unfamiliar, Fast Sunday just means that once a month, it’s typical for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to abstain from food and water and to donate the money they would have spent, or more, to those in need).
Since it was so early, there was still plenty of shade from the morning sun beside the shipping container, so I took my place between the bunnies who, though not tame enough to come close, are unconcerned enough that they’re not concerned if we’re 15-20 feet away.
Especially Curly, who’s been around for years now (the one with the deformed/damaged ears). One day maybe I can coax that one to come close. 🙃
Anyway, I spent some time chatting with the Big Guy, set my power station charging to try and top it off 🙏¹ before heading out on my trip today, spent some time cleaning out Zora’s sore (which already had additional pus inside 😕), and then headed to the springs to take a bath. 😁
There was a lady at the springs filling up jugs of water with spring water, so I went over to the place that I had been building last year to see what it looked like, and it was…
Not in good shape. 😅
Over the last 7 or 8 months or so, it’s filled up with plants and algae and what not. Not a very appetizing environment to hang out in. Just moving around and it stirs up dirt and plant matter everywhere.
Makes me wonder how the other one stays clean? 🤔
After taking a bath in the deeper part of the river itself (instead of in my little soaking area), which was quite refreshing 🙏¹, I wandered back up to my van and struck up a conversation with the lady who was still gathering spring water.
She’s a local from in town, which surprised me a little bit that she would drive all the way out here for drinking water, but apparently, she really likes the taste of this water, so… great. 😊
Once at church, I got myself changed into my church clothes, chatted for a little bit with one of the members who actually remembered my name, amazingly (I didn’t remember his 😅).
Not very many people there today. Apparently, a sickness is going around, but it was still good.
I let myself get fairly distracted I think both in sacrament meeting and Sunday school, but Sunday school for sure, asking Gospel questions to Google’s AI and discovering the AI lying to me.
😶
Ummm…
I had asked it to find me specific quotes from LDS Apostles and Prophets on a particular topic, and it came back with several quotes. I also asked it to give me the sources those quotes were taken from.
The response came back with multiple quotes with sources, but when I went to those sources to find the quotes, the quotes weren’t there.
So I confronted the AI (so to speak), and it acknowledged that the sources weren’t quite accurate and tried to give me a second attempt.
But once again, I couldn’t find those specific quotes anywhere in the sources cited.
Finally, after confronting the AI yet again, it admitted that the quotes it had given me never actually existed. That it had synthesized the quotes from different teachings, bringing them all together into a “quote” that was a combination of both actual teaching and interpretation of actual teaching.
Good crap Google.
So I tried Grok, which I much prefer anyway (but grok has been unreliable lately, giving messages that it’s busy and can’t perform the task, and trying to funnel you off to the pay version). On the second attempt, I managed to get Grok to answer the same question, and it gave me specific quotes that I was able to verify were actually real quotes.
Grok has been head and shoulders better than Google’s Gemini for me in pretty much every instance. It’s just that there’s always been a significant limit to the number of questions that I can ask Grok per day before I have to pay, and Google’s Gemini has no such limit (at least, not that I’ve ever run into).
But I guess you get what you pay for. 😅
After church, I bid goodbye to Hot Springs and headed out on my journey. As I got going, I decided to perform an experiment. My gas mileage had been significantly better limiting my speed to 65 mph. I wondered what would happen if I limited it to 55.
It would lengthen my trip to Arkansas by multiple hours, but I wondered what it might do to my fuel economy.
As I drove along, quite slowly 😆, I struggled to stay off my phone.
It’s so. hard. 😅
I failed for pretty much the entire drive. 😬
Gull durn it. 🙃
As I drove along, speaking of my phone, I got a notification from Audible one of my sisters had sent me a gift of an audiobook. 😊🙏²
We then chatted on the phone for a good little while. 😊
Took me awhile to figure out how to access the book that she had gotten me. For the life of me, I couldn’t find my regular book list that shows me all the audiobooks that I own.
I searched and searched, and following the instructions online, the page that opened up only had a single title on it, and I knew that I had over 30.
Eventually, I realized that Audible remembers your last filter setting, so I only had one book on there because it was holding on to a filter that I had apparently put in place who knows how many months ago. 😶
At least I figured it out. 🙏³
I texted a little bit with my sister Heather. I worked on my journaling a little bit, but even though I dictate my journal, I still have to look at my phone screen to make sure that it’s not writing gibberish, so… it just means that I’m basically on my phone while driving. 😅
As I drove along, I was astounded at the number of miles on my trip odometer compared to what my fuel gauge was telling me.
When I reached halfway on the gauge, I’d already traveled 370 miles. 😲
Generally, I think my tank is usually low enough to go fill it up somewhere around 430 or 450 miles.
I know full well that fuel gauges can be wildly misleading, and that oftentimes in the past when I’ve had a whole bunch of miles on the trip odometer by a certain point in the tank, then usually there’s a much quicker drop the rest of the way, as the fuel sensor sort of figures out that it’s not quite accurate.
But to get 370… That would require a precipitous drop.
Which didn’t happen. 😶
In fact, by the time I stopped for gas, I had driven six. hundred. miles. 😲
And my low fuel light hadn’t even come on yet. 🤯
For the previous probably couple hundred miles, I had been estimating my fuel economy. Figuring that when I filled up, it would take probably 33 gallons, and so I kept checking to see what my absolute worst fuel economy would be, such as needing to stop for gas immediately.
And as I drove along, it just ticked higher and higher. 16 miles per gallon as the absolute worst, then 17 mph is the absolute worst.
Finally, after finding a cheaper gas station a little out of my way, which wasn’t too concerning because I really wanted to cross over the 600 mile Mark before getting gas (in fact, once I reach the gas station, I was still a mile and a half shy of 600 mi for the tank, so I drove around town for a mile and a half in the wee hours of the morning just so I could cross 600 before actually filling up 🙃).
Anyway, by the time I went to fill up, it seemed reasonable that I was going to be over 18 miles to the gallon. Which, for this high-topped beast, was better than I ever thought was possible.
So what was my surprise when, after filling up my tank in Fairfax, Missouri, the pump cut off after only 30 gallons. 😶
19.95 mpg
🤯
Of course, I knew that some pumps cut off sooner than others, but I was basically looking at over 18 miles to the gallon as a worst-case scenario, and possibly basically 20 miles per gallon if the pump cut off properly.
That’s just nutty.
Sure, driving 15 mph below the speed limit means a much longer drive, but I wasn’t really in a hurry, so the only concerns are nerve pain and discomfort.
Which… after living with a partially numb leg for the last couple weeks, is a bit more concerning than it used to be.
But anyway, I figured at worst, I used eight fewer gallons than I would have compared to my normal fuel economy, and if the pump cut off at an accurate point, I used 11 fewer gallons.
Wow.
🙏³
I spent some more time pondering delivery business ideas as I went along, and though I was tired and had already been driving for nearly a dozen hours, I decided I didn’t want to stop north of Kansas City and have to go through the city during the day, so I drove another 2 hours, or so, south, so that I could go through the city in the middle of the night and be beyond any traffic concerns in the morning.
Gratefully, I found a truck stop that was willing to let people stay overnight in the parking lot, and I finally crashed for the night somewhere around 3:30 a.m., I think.
😴
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 