Another year has passed, and our family made this trip to the beach in Chincoteague again. I feel like this is becoming a “thing” for us…
However, instead of renting bikes once we were there like we did last year, we decided to take our own bikes with us. So this year, we took the “big car” (Caprice wagon) instead of the “little car” (Metro). A lot has changed with the wagon since I wrote about it on here three years ago. I’m planning to update the wagon’s build thread here in the next few weeks, but in the meantime, I’ll summarize briefly what has changed. Basically, the wagon is now mechanically equivalent to a three-quarter ton truck. It has:
-An NV4500 (heavy duty) manual transmission
-9.5” 14-bolt rear end
-4.10 gears with an Eaton E-Locker differential
-LT-metric Load Range “E” (10-ply) tires (LT215/85R16)
-Heavy duty brakes, springs, suspension components, etc.
I figure the car should be good for towing 9,000 lbs., and I’ve done close to that a few times. However, I’ve also continued to do more engine tuning, areo mods, and reduction of parasitic losses over the last few years, and I’ve been looking forward to doing a “long trip” to see what it can do now. This vacation proved to be a good chance to do just that.
Long story short: we loaded up the car with two (700c) adult bikes, two kids’ “tag-along” bikes, a bike trailer (for carting all of our gear to the beach), luggage, toys, books, etc.—and the four of us. It was mostly a long, hot, clear highway trip both there and back (with lots of P&G), but we did have a bit of rain both ways, some wind on the way home, and we did do a few short trips once we were there. We drove a total of exactly 750 miles and used 14.837 gallons, fillup to fillup, resulting in
50.55 MPG.
Sure, it’s not nearly as good as our Metro would have been, but the money we saved on the bike rental more than made up for the difference in fuel costs, and we still did better than many other Metro drivers would have done on the same trip.
