Brendy (RPS in peace) liked Keep Driving. Nic (RPS in peace) liked Keep Driving. I (RPS still alive) liked Keep Driving. Julian (RPS currently boss) liked Keep Driving. You, reader, should play road trip RPG Keep Driving if you haven't already. A good excuse to do so is the fact that it's getting official mod support via the Steam Workshop on September 28th.

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I buy a new car a lot sooner than I expect to because — well, why not?

For a single person living alone with no kids, I have a lot of cars. I occasionally refer to them as my fleet.

• I have my 1999 Jeep Wrangler, which I bought brand new, beat the crap out of, and use as my local around-town vehicle. It’s in decent shape but wouldn’t win any awards at a car show, despite it’s age. A trailer hitch on the front makes it the perfect vehicle for shuffling around trailers in the garage or driveway.


My Jeep in its younger days, crawling over rocks in Sedona AZ. It’s on its third soft top now.

• I have my 2003 Honda S2000, which I bought brand new and took good care of. It’s my Joy Machine and makes me happy every time I drive it. It’s fast with tight steering and good brakes. The convertible top makes it almost as good as a motorcycle for feeling the air around me — but no helmet required! It’s impractical as a vehicle, but has decent fuel efficiency and is oh so fun. I use if on road trips when I don’t need to carry a lot of luggage, as well as on day trips up into the mountains.


I can’t imagine any car being more fun to drive than my Honda S2000.

• I have my 2012 Ford F35 SuperDuty Diesel Crew Cab with an 8-foot bed, which I bought in 2015. It’s my workhorse and I use it to haul just about anything that needs hauling: building or garden supplies, my slide-in truck camper, and my (oversize load) boat. I also used it on my trips to and from the marina in Bellingham where my boat lives, mostly because it can haul all the stuff I need to drag along with me when I go out on my boat.


My boat weighs 13,000 pounds on its trailer. Good thing my truck can tow 16,000 pounds.

Each vehicle is different. Each has its pros and cons. If I had to get rid of one of them, I’d have a hard time choosing because they each do different things for me.

They’re also each paid for in full and have their own space in my larger-than-average — okay, humungous — garage. Cheap to keep, easy to take care of. Always ready when I need them.

I Want a New Car

But I’ve been wanting a new car for a while. Remember, the last new-to-me vehicle I bought was my truck, 11 years ago. Before that, it was my Honda, 22 years ago. Sheesh.

It would be nice to buy something more fuel efficient, possibly to take advantage of the cheap power where I live. Electric would be nice, but not on a road trip. Hybrid would be nice for a road trip, but it wouldn’t really take advantage of the cheap power at home. The answer was, of course, a plug-in hybrid. Something I can keep plugged in when not in use and then use for virtually free local driving and more fuel efficient road trips.

And wouldn’t it be nice to have a vehicle with all the new bells and whistles I’d experienced in new rentals cars over the years? All those cameras and Apple Car Play?

I certainly did not need a fourth car. And I couldn’t get rid of any of the ones I have because they each do their own special things for me. So I figured I’d wait until I started downsizing. The truck wouldn’t be needed when I sold the boat; I’d sell the slide-in truck camper with it. The Jeep wouldn’t be needed when I got rid of my utility trailer and the boat trailer. When I sold those, I’d buy a nice plug-in hybrid SUV or “crossover” vehicle to replace them. Then I’d be down to just two cars, like a more normal person.

That was the plan, anyway.

In early June, as I steered my truck through the mountains on the long drive back from Bellingham, I started questioning this plan. I wasn’t getting any younger. Why should I wait? It’s not as if I’d get a big windfall from the sale of a 27+ year old Jeep and a truck with nearly 200,000 miles on it. I was turning 65 at the end of the month. Didn’t I deserve a big birthday present for such a big birthday? And why shouldn’t I have a new car while I was young enough to enjoy it?

And wasn’t my boat named Do It Now for a reason?

So just like that, I decided to buy myself a new car for my birthday.

Choosing the Car

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t do much research. Most of the folks I spoke to raved about the Toyota RAV4, which was now available as a plugin hybrid. Toyota is the maker of one of the first hybrid cars out there: the Prius, which they first sold in December 1997. They still made and sold that car and I suspected that they’d learned a lot in the nearly 20 years since its first release. Everything I read and saw online in car guy videos confirmed this.

So I went to look at one, all ready to buy. The local Toyota dealer only had one on the lot and it was sold. But I got to see it and sit inside. It met my needs as an eventual replacement for the truck and Jeep as far as practicality was concerned. It even had limited towing capabilities. I could keep the Honda for fun and use this as my every day car.

The local dealer didn’t seem to understand that I was ready to buy the car. He kept saying I should think it over and get back to him. Instead, I asked when more were coming in. I told him I was ready to buy. It’s a shame (for him) that he didn’t have one to sell me. This was early on in my limited research and I didn’t know much about the various “trims” they sold. I probably would have bought the first one he offered me. But there was a list and he put me on it. The car was in high demand. It might be a few weeks.

In the meantime, I did a bit more homework and decided that I wanted the Woodland trim. This was a middle-range trim with some good rough road features. There was even a video on YouTube of a guy taking one “off road.” I told him I’d take any color except white, black, or green. (That left a shade of blue and a shade of dark gray.)

Waiting for the Car

And then I waited. For more than a week, nothing. I called to see if anything was coming in and he said there was but they were already spoken for. I reminded him I was ready to buy.

I sold 100 shares of Apple stock for a generous downpayment and put the money in my savings account.

After that, every once in a while he’d text me about cars coming in that did not match my criteria. The first was a low-end SE model. Another was a white Woodland. And then there was the XSE model that he said was very rare and he’d have to charge a $5k premium for it. I didn’t want it and now he was pissing me off.

So I started working the phones. I talked to Toyota dealers in Washington, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon. A few said they only sold locally, which honestly made no sense to me. Wouldn’t they rather sell the car to someone out of the area so they wouldn’t have to deal with warranty service and repairs? Some made promises and started sending me info about what was coming in. One guy even called on his private cell phone because he claimed they were required to sell locally but he was willing to make an exception for me.

WTF?

Eventually, I struck a deal with Troy in Boise. He managed to find the car in inventory being prepped for shipping to the US. Did I want it? Blue Toyota RAV4 Plugin Hybrid with moon roof. Yes. Sign this contract and send a $2K deposit. I did.

That was in late June. The car would be ready sometime between July 5 and August 11.

Life went on. My friend Janet came to stay with me for about two weeks at the end of June and into July. We camped with the truck and camper in the North Cascades and then took the boat out around the San Juan Islands and into Canada for 10 days. The local Toyota dealer kept texting me about cars that didn’t match my criteria.

Then I got a date from Troy. The car would be ready on July 13.

The timing couldn’t be better. I would be back from my boat trip and had a full two weeks before my next boat trip. (Long story there.) Plenty of time to get out to Boise and have a nice, leisurely road trip back. We set the pickup date for July 14, exactly two weeks after my 65th birthday.

Picking Up the Car

One of the things few people know about me is that I am a logistics whiz. I quickly determined that the quickest and easiest way for me to get from the Wenatchee area to Boise ID was to rent a car. I got a one-way car rental out of Wenatchee with Enterprise, left my pups with a neighbor, and headed out early in the morning of July 12. By 5 PM local time, I was checking into a nice hotel about a mile from the car dealer.

The next morning, I dropped off my luggage at the dealer, returned the rental car, and made the short walk back to the dealer. By then, my car was out in front of the building.

Troy took this photo of me with my new car before I’d even sat inside it. The funny thing is that I wore that shirt to match the car, thinking the color was the light blue in the shirt. It turned out to match the dark blue in the shirt. The other color was weird, but I was mentally prepped for it. This color is a lot more normal and although I like it, I’m not sure if normal is a good thing for me.

Then there was the paperwork. There was a lot of it. Payment was made more complicated because Toyota Financing’s systems were down and, for some reason, my transfer of $30K from my savings to checking account was delayed. Finally, things were settled. I did buy the 10 year extended warranty — remember, this is probably the last car I’ll ever buy. They got me a good loan rate because my credit score is “exceptional.” By 1 PM, I had all my stuff loaded into the car, shook hands with Troy, and drove out of the lot.

Since Then

That was just over a month ago. I did a 3-day road trip through central Idaho and into the Hells Canyon area before coming home. The car drove great. It was comfortable and had a lot of features. In many ways, it’s a computer with a car attached. I learned a lot about it on that long drive and have learned a lot since.

I stopped at a riverside parking area to eat the lunch I bought at a supermarket after leaving the dealer. From here, I drove up to McCall ID, a place I last visited in 2005 in my Honda.

But this blog post is already long enough. I’ll have to write another one with my observations.

I’ll just say one thing for now: I’m glad I didn’t wait.

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world.

The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communications with NASA in 2018.

So how did Perseverance reach this record-setting distance in just a third of the time?

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On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the moments ahead of impact.

Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. On X, Musk disputed the claim, writing that Butler must have overridden the feature because “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!” Moving to back Musk’s claim, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, said that internal data showed “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent of the accel pedal in this residential area.”

NTSB’s preliminary report, which does not yet determine what caused the crash, confirmed Tesla’s claims. Its probe found that FSD was engaged at the time of the crash, but electronic data showed “the driver manually overrode FSD (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent.”

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I take a quick look back at the nearly three month trip I took to Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

As regular readers know, I go south every winter. I love my home but I don’t like winters here. It isn’t the cold as much as it’s the dreariness. So I go south, usually to Arizona and the desert southwest, although I did spend two winters on my boat on the Great Loop in mostly Florida a few years ago.

This year, I left on November 27, 2025 (Thanksgiving Day) and returned home on February 12, 2026. I have an excellent winter housesitter, which takes a lot of the worries out of leaving home for so long. He’s a skier and he likes the proximity of Mission Ridge and Steven’s Pass, two local ski resorts. He was not happy about the lack of real winter weather this year. But that lack of winter weather is what got me home early; I was supposed to come home at the end of February.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to write up a summary of my trip’s expenses. I think I managed to do it quite affordably this year. You be the judge.

Fuel

Fuel was my biggest expense. I drove roughly 4500 miles — Central Washington to the Phoenix area to Albuquerque to Las Cruces to Sierra Vista to the Phoenix area to Quartzsite to Yuma to Holtville to Salton Sea (Mecca) to Death Valley to Central Washington. I suppose I could plot the whole trip and get an exact mileage, but I think this is pretty close considering all the little side trips I made along the way.

I went through Death Valley on my way home. They were forecasting a Superbloom this spring and I think they’ll have it, but the best bloom I saw was at the south end of Badwater Road where it climbs up toward Shoshone. Simply said, I was about 2-4 weeks too early. So I only spent one night.

I was driving my pickup, which gets decent mileage, considering its size. But I had the truck camper on top, which is quite a load, and I was towing a utility trailer. I got about 12 miles per gallon.

I spent a total of $1,493 on diesel. This was taking advantage of Fred Meyer and Fry’s discounts everywhere possible and making sure I topped off in cheaper places — like in Yuma instead of Southern California and then Barstow instead of near Death Valley. The highest price I saw for diesel was $6.80/gallon in Death Valley, but the highest I think I paid was $4.79/gallon at Barstow.

Camping

I camped in my RV a total of 77 nights. They can be broken down as follows:

*The part hookup campgrounds and two of the no hookup campgrounds had RV dump facilities and drinking water available.

Honestly, I think the cost of full hookup campsites is outrageous these days. The one at Salton Sea was quite affordable at $36.25 including reservation fees. Not only did it include power, water, and sewer hookups, but there was a BBQ grill, picnic table, and a great view of the lake. But a gravel, featureless parking spot in Quartzsite for $70/night? They get you coming and going there.

I like to spend a night every week or so at a full or part hookup campground just to “refresh” my camper — empty the waste tanks, fill the water tank, make sure the battery is fully charged.

I should mention here that although I brought my little Honda 2KW generator along with me, I never even took it out. My solar panels brought in enough power during the day for the 66 days I camped without any power hookup. Meanwhile, in many campgrounds that had no hookup — I’m looking at you, Boulder Beach — I had to listen to someone else’s generator from 6 AM to 10 PM. I’ll take the empty desert any day.

You can bet I didn’t hear any generators — or anything else, for that matter — at this campsite west of Shoshone and just south of Death Valley National Park. No one came down that road the entire time I was there.

If you’re RVing and you need a generator or power connection for an overnight stay, you’re doing it wrong.

Other Expenses

I ate out once in a while but not very often. I bought groceries. Although I could work up total costs for my meals, I don’t bother because I have to eat no matter where I go. Buying groceries and cooking at the camper saves a lot of money — just like cooking at home is cheaper than eating out.

I also had to pay for laundry at laundromats. I estimate that cost about $100 total. I think I did laundry 6 times while I was on the road.

I also didn’t add up the cost of propane. My camper uses propane for the stove, water heater, and furnace. It also uses propane to run the refrigerator when I’m not plugged in at a campground. I only heat the water once a day — in the morning to do the dishes and wash up. The furnace is probably the biggest consumer; I’m not going to be cold at night. This was a pretty mild winter, though. In the past, while boondocking, a 5-gallon tank of propane usually lasted about a week. This year, I got at least 10 days out of each one. It cost about $15 to refill and I think I got 6 refills.

(Why on earth are people using Blue Rhino and swapping tanks? Don’t you realize it costs about $10 more than just refilling your own tank? Six times is $60.)

Last RV Trip South?

Although it was nice to stop in new places along the way — I spent more than a week in New Mexico this year — it was not nice to drag that cargo trailer. The only reason I had it with me was because I had at least two art shows to attend and I had all kinds of show equipment to bring with me. The first show was a bust — I barely broke even. The second was okay, but none of my better work sold. It seems that people are holding onto their money these days and are less likely to spend it on things they don’t need. I certainly didn’t need to do those two shows. (In fact, the way the economy is going — not to mention the price of silver, which I use in my work — I’ve decided to take a step back (again) from doing art shows.)

I’m thinking that there are more places south of where I live than the US desert southwest. Mexico is cheap and easy and I have friends that spend the winter there. But maybe it’s time to start planning that trip to Australia that I’ve put off for 13 years. I’m not getting any younger. Three months down under might do me good.