When we set off on our 50 state road trip on January 1, 2018, our car’s odometer was at 79,378. Since then we’ve driven an average of about 23,000 miles per year.
That meant that by the time we got to Salt Lake City, UT in May 2022, we noticed that we were approaching 100,000 miles on the road trip. We’d therefore been keeping an eye on our odometer so that we could celebrate once we reached 100,000 miles.
Towards the end of our time in Salt Lake City, we decided to drive 1.5 hours west to Bonneville Salt Flats. Bonneville Salt Flats are what the name suggests – a 12 mile long salt pan that’s thought to hold almost 150 million tons of salt.
One of the great features of the Bonneville Salt Flats is that you can drive your car out on the flats. The salt is hard and compacted (although perhaps not after rain), so we had no problem driving around on there despite not having an off-road vehicle.
After driving around a little, we picked a spot to set down a picnic blanket and have some lunch. We then put booties on Truffles so that she could walk around on the salt flats. Salt is bad for dog paws which is why we put them on to protect her – it wasn’t only for the cute photo opportunity 😉
After enjoying the salt flats for a while, we hopped back in our car to head towards the Great Salt Lake. Shortly after leaving it occurred to me that we were due to be pretty close to the 100,000 mile mark on our road trip given how far we’d driven that day. I asked Shae for a reminder as to what our car’s mileage was when we started the road trip and she said it was 79,378.
I looked down at the odometer hoping to see that we were still under 179,378.
We were at 179,380 miles.
We’d missed the 100,000 mile mark by two measly miles.
To make matters even worse, we’d only left the Bonneville Salt Flats a few miles earlier. If we’d realized just how close we were to hitting 100,000 miles on the road trip, we’d have driven another couple of miles on the salt flats as that would’ve been a suitably epic place to hit such a significant milestone.
Instead, we pulled off on a random side road to take a photo of the odometer and our disappointed faces.
What was particularly frustrating was that just a few days earlier we’d discussed putting a sticky note next to the odometer as a reminder to keep an eye on it. We forgot to do that though and sure enough – we missed our odometer reading hitting 179,378.
Depending on how much we drive over the course of our last 3.5 years of the road trip, we might end up putting another 100,000 miles on the car. Although our average yearly mileage suggests we won’t hit that threshold, in our final year we’ll be driving up to Alaska and back again, so that’ll put a decent amount of miles on it. We’ll therefore have to be far more careful to keep an eye on our odometer if and when we approach 200,000 miles on the road trip as I’d hate to note learn from this latest road trip mistake!
[…] it was during our visit there that we made our latest road trip mistake by missing that we’d just hit our 100,000th mile on the road trip. Still, it was a fun and […]