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My name is Larry Redalia and my wife and I are driving across America in a diesel 1978 Mercedes Benz 300D that I converted myself to run on vegetable oil. My wife is the "Queen of Green", Debra Lynn Dadd, so we're both very interested in technologies that are better for health and the environment. On this page we are keeping a journal of our trip so you can see what it is like to run a car on veggie oil and how it fares under different conditions and climates. Debra is doing all the writing and photographing for us.
[Entries are in day order, so scroll down for new day entries]
Day 1: left Pasadena at 2:00 pm. Odometer reading 198,802. About 15 gallons of vegetable oil in the tank.
Drove east on 210 topped for lunch at a family chain restaurant. While we were eating and contemplating how there was no rush to get to Las Vegas, my phone rang and it was the ABC-affiliate television station in Las Vegas wanting to interview us about the car and our cross-country trip. The next morning. So now we had to get to Las Vegas by the following morning.
After eating, we told the waitress that our car ran on waste vegetable oil (WVO) and asked her if we could have some. She was very interested and was entirely willing to give us all the WVO they had. She took us out back, but the collection container was empty! It had just been picked up for disposal. So we had to look elsewhere.
Got on 15 to drive to Las Vegas through the Mojave Desert. The scenery was breathtaking, but it was very hot. We were driving up and down mountains up to 4000 feet above sea level in a fully packed car, pulling a trailer, with the air conditioning on, and the car ran great on veggie oil. No overheating. When we got to Baker at 6:30, the temperature was 107 degrees at elevation 4000 feet!
The car was running great, but as we approached Las Vegas, we were running out of veggie oil fuel. There are, of course, no restaurants in the Mojave Desert. As we watched the gas gauge moved toward empty, I made a note that we need to do a better job of thinking ahead. We passed gas stations, but no restaurants. We have to keep in mind there may not be places to get veggie oil, and we need to be prepared.
By 7:15, as we came down to 3000 feet, it was still 95 degrees.
When we got to the California-Nevada border, we decided to stop and buy four gallons of diesel and put it in a container--just in case. We wanted to drive across the whole country on vegetable oil, so we didn't put it in the gas tank.
As we approached Las Vegas and saw the lights of the Strip up ahead, we pulled out our GPS to find an Asian restaurant. Having a GPS is a big timesaver because you can enter a search for "Asian food" and it finds the closest restaurant and leads you right to it. So we just chose the closest Thai restaurant.
After eating our dinner, we told the waitress that our car runs on waste vegetable oil and asked if we have some of theirs. She went to get the manager. Now, one of the things we're learning is that to get oil, one does need some good communication skills. And sometimes we are talking to people who don't speak very good English. After some back and forth and the manager expressing uncertainty about her authority to make a decision, Larry said, "We're going to be on television tomorrow morning and need some vegetable oil for the interview." It was now about 9:30 and we needed vegetable oil.
The manager lit up and said, "Come here in the back with me!" And we got almost 20 gallons of vegetable oil. It tooks about 20 minutes to pump it from their large container to our 5 gallon containers using a manual hand pump. As Larry pumped the oil, one by one the workers came out to see the car. They couldn't believe we were going to put their waste oil into our car and it would run. We had to tell them it was a special car and not to put oil into their gas tanks, but they were all very interested. And the manager was just standing there smiling, saying in her broken English, "Celebrities! Celebrities! TV tomorrow!"
We set our GPS to look for the nearest hotel, and as we rolled into the parking lot, ready to fall into bed for a good night's sleep, the red light came on to tell us we were just about out of fuel.
More tomorrow...
First thing in the morning, Larry went down to the parking lot to filter the waste vegetable oil (WVO) we collected last night from the Thai restaurant, while I wrote about yesterday's adventures on this page. Filtering the WVO was going slower than he expected. It turned out that the WVO had some beef fat in it, so it filtered more slowly (the filtering removed the beef fat, so it's wasn't a problem to use the vegetable oil in the car). This reminded me to note that there is a wide variation in the quality of vegetable oils we find. Some are mixed with animal fat, some just has a lot of debris in it. I think it would be great if restaurant owners would separate out the waste vegetable oil from the waste animal fat, but to them, it's all just "grease." Also, just a note that air temperature can affect filtering time, too. In San Francisco, where it was about 50 degrees, it took a lot longer to filter the oil. ABC news Channel 13 called us again in the morning to set up a time to shoot the story (they didn't wait for us to call) and they met us in the parking lot of the hotel at 11:15. They wanted to film the whole process, including filtering the WVO, and we didn't have any to filter. So Larry went to the hotel restaurant. They didn't have any in their collection container, but gave Larry 5 gallons of fresh waste vegetable oil right out of the french fryer. The story ran on the 5 o'clock news.
At the end of the shoot, the producer and cameraman took us to Las Vegas Chinatown, which is a huge strip mall that is full of Chinese restaurants and stores. We thought it would be a bonanza for WVO. The last shot they wanted for the TV news was us walking into a restaurant to get some oil. So we just walked into to closest restaurant and sat down for lunch as long as we were there. Food wasn't very good. After lunch we asked about WVO and the manager was very excited about our car, but couldn't give us oil because it was all being recycled in a new system. There was no collection to take it from. Larry decided to go searching for WVO by walking around the back alley where the collection containers would be to find oil first before asking. I went off for a walk around the shops and had a reflexology foot massage that was so good that I had a chair massage too. I don't have much interest in doing the actual oil collection, so our agreement is that Larry will collect and filter the oil, and during that time I get to do something else. By the time I got back an hour later, Larry had found no WVO. It was 100 degrees and overcast. While I was having my massage, a thunderstorm had passed over and the air was humid. We were miserable. So Larry filtered the remaining 5 gallons of WVO we had, and we headed north on I-15 for the next leg of our trip. But between the television shoot and oil collection, we didn't leave until 3:30. The drive was beautiful. We left Nevada, and crossed through Arizona, driving through the gorges of Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area with it's sheer walls of twisted sedimentary rock on both sides of the road. It was, as Larry said "gorgeous" (see someone else's video of the drive on You-Tube). After the hot barrenness of the desert, it was good to see actual water in the riverbed and greenery. We saw the first red "painted" rocks, indicators of more to come tomorrow. After eating at a bad Chinese restaurant for and not getting any WVO, we decided to make a new strategy. We would make sure that there WAS oil first, then ask if we could have it, then eat. At 6:00, we crossed the border into Utah and stopped in St. George. We found a Chinese restaurant using our GPS and Larry checked out the oil out back. Looked good. But they wouldn't let us have any. They had a contract, they said, for pick-up. By this time, I was starving and way too hot after a day in the 100 degree sun. I insisted we have dinner, oil or no oil. So we went to a place that had a salad bar. Larry checked their oil and found it to be acceptable, but we didn't collect it because we still had miles to drive in order to arrive in Boulder, Colorado the following day. So we got back on I-15 and continued to drive north. As the sun set and the full moon rose, we enjoyed a cool evening of driving through the quiet mountains. We went over a 6600 foot summit and then a 7100 summit, and our veggie car just kept chugging along with no problems. We finally stopped around 11:30 pm and spent the night in Richfield, Utah.
Anything new always needs a time period to work out the kinks--both in getting the technology to work and getting the user to work the technology. We had to go through some of that today. But first, the good news. In the morning, we had a quarter tank of waste vegetable oil (WVO) fuel--about 5 gallons. It was all we had. So we needed more fuel to get to Colorado. While I went for a swim in the hotel pool, Larry went out scouting for more WVO. Richfield is a very small town, so Larry just drove around. It was about 9:30 in the morning. First he went to a fast food place, but the oil was "too grungy--too much hamburger stuff--the oil was real thick with globs of fat". It wasn't OK. Then he went to a taco place. Though most taco places use lard, which cannot be used in a veggie oil car, this place used vegetable oil. Larry went in and had a good burrito, but the manager wouldn't give him any oil because he had a contract with a company that pays him for the oil. Then Larry went to a Chinese restaurant that wasn't open yet. But there were people inside so he knocked on the door. He asked for their WVO and they said, "Sure!" Larry got 32 gallons of WVO! A real bonanza! He then filtered 5 gallons and put it in the tank. So we got on the road at 11:30 with half a tank of fuel and another 27 gallons of WVO that needed filtering. More than enough to get to the Denver area. Odometer 199,378. The scenery on I-70 was stunningly beautiful all day. There were magnificent rock formations like I had never seen before. There were miles of "castle rocks" that actually look like houses jutting out of the rock. And lots of open space and sky. Beautiful! There was nothing but empty land for miles and miles. After we left Richfield, it was more than 100 miles before we got to the next town--Green River. We stopped in Green River for lunch. Larry sat in the parking lot and filtered 15 more gallons of WVO while I went inside the air conditioned restaurant and ate (of course, I brought out something for him!). While Larry was filtering oil, a man on a motorcycle stopped and said he saw us on TV in Las Vegas the previous night. He said he smelled the food smell before he saw the car and then recognized Larry from the news. He told Larry he thought our veggie car was a very good thing and more people should do it. The man was returning from riding his motorcycle the entire length of Route 66--from Chicago to Santa Monica--a lifeline dream. It was such a relaxing ride. As we charged our cell phones in the car as we were driving we realized that we now have vegetable oil powered phones! We stopped for dinner in Glenwood Springs, a charming town with lots of old buildings. It was a microbrewery, and I had to taste their brewed root beer made with local honey. I'm a big fan of root beer (though I rarely drink it now) and this was the best. We still had about 180 miles to drive after dinner, and started up I-70 along the Colorado River. The elevation kept climbing with one mountain after another, so the going was slow. And it was getting dark. Just after we passed the town of Vail, we started up Vail Pass and the engine began to go slower and slower. We were just inching along and managed to get to the summit at 10,603 feet, where there were patches of snow. We cruised down the other side to Copper Mountain and pulled in to a closed gas station where there was light. By this time it was about 11:30 and very cold. So cold we could see our breath. Larry changed one of the filters. The time to change it was overdue and he had planned to change it once we got to Broomfield. But it needed changing now. Changing the filter helped, but when we got to the next mountain, the engine stopped entirely. It was just too cold for the veggie oil. Our system is designed to work in temperatures above 50 degrees F, which is fine in Florida, but not at 10,000+ feet in the middle of the night. We had some diesel fuel with us, but putting it in after the fact didn't fix it. We had to call for a tow for the last 27 miles. We arrived at the hotel, in the tow truck, at 5:15 am. The eastern sky was pink and yellow. It was almost dawn.
Lessons of the day: Now we know. We won't make these mistakes again!
Today I am speaking at a conference to health care providers, and Larry is unclogging the fuel lines on the car. We've got plenty of vegetable oil. Tomorrow we'll be on the road again...
Well...we managed to drive about five miles before the engine started slowing down again. Larry spent most of yesterday working on the car. The problem wasn't that we were running the car on waste vegetable oil (WVO), but rather there was something mechanically wrong with the car itself. And this is an important thing to keep in mind about converting a car to run on vegetable oil. The easist cars to convert are the 1977-1985 Mercedes Benz diesels, which are old, used cars. Keep in mind that even though Mercedes is an excpetionally well-built car and these diesel engines are practically indestructable (the known record is held by Gregorios Sachinidis, a Greek taxi driver who drove 2,852,000 miles in his 1976 Mercedes-Benz 240D, there are a number of Mercedes known to have been driven over a million miles) mechanical things can go wrong. In our case, however, yesterday the problem wasn't with the Mercedes. After seven long hours, Larry finally found the cause of our engine difficulties: a $3 filter. When we started having engine problems on Thursday night, Larry thought it was this filter. He checked it and it was clogged. So he replaced it with a new one that he fortunately had the in trunk. But there was pinprick hole in it, invisible to the eye, but big enough to put air bubbles into the fuel as it passed through. And that's what was making the engine stall. As it turned out, all we needed to do out on that cold mountain in the middle of the night was to remove this filter entirely, and we could have driven to our destination instead of being towed. Live and learn. This is part of why Larry wanted to take this trip, to find out what might go wrong. So if you're having a problem, check out the parts--even brand new ones right out of the box--before you start wondering if the WVO is the problem. By the time the car was ready to roll, we were exhausted and just drove it to the nearest hotel.
This morning Larry filtered our remaining vegetable oil and put it in the tank while I went for a walk in the hotel pool and had breakfast. We set out at 9:45. Odometer 199,860. We had a full tank of WVO and about a gallon additional in reserve. We are now bound for Bentonville AR (yes, home of WalMart) where I will be doing a consultation helping a woman choose a home that she can make nontoxic. I need to be there by Monday night. I had originally scheduled three days for the 800+ mile drive, and now we had only two days, so we need to get going. After coming into the Denver area through the dramatic mountains of the west, today we drove through the flat plains east of Denver into the croplands of Kansas. We passed a big wind farm with lots of windmills whirling. That was good to see. But it was miles and miles of just wide-open farmland with few towns and even fewer Asian restaurants or even restaurants of any kind. We were targeting Topeka as a stopover point for the night, but after driving 200 miles, we had only a half a tank of fuel left. With the car weighed down with boxes and luggage, pulling a trailer with all our veggie oil parafinalia, and the air conditioner blasting (it was almost 100 degrees), we weren't getting the gas mileage we would have otherwise. So we weren't going to make it to to Topeka and decided to stop in Salina, the next closest city. Five miles before we reached Salina, and the first possibility of collecting more WVO in 450 miles, the red warning light went on. We weren't going to make it through collecting more veggie oil with the amount of fuel we had in the tank. We had already added our extra reserve gallon. So we stopped at a gas station and bought 5 gallons of diesel. We were disappointed to do that, since we wanted to do the whole trip on veggie oil, but there was no place to get WVO for a stretch longer than we could travel on our tank of fuel. Larry said that if we didn't have to spend the previous day fixing the car, he could have collected more WVO before we left, but we had to get the miles in today to get to Bentonville for my consultation, and couldn't take the time for collecting veggie oil this morning. Lesson: Be really prepared with backup veggie oil, especially on long, remote stretches. When we got to Salina, we used our GPS to find a Chinese restaurant. The first one wasn't there at all, the second one was no longer in business, and we couldn't find the third one. Larry checked the oil at a Mexican restaurant, but it contained too much lard. Not having a clue where to go next, Larry pulled into the parking lot of a drive-in and checked their oil. It was good. We went inside and asked if we could have some of their waste vegetable oil. Well, it turned out that the manager was all excited about what we were doing, came out to look at the car, was thrilled to help us do something "out of the box" and talked our ears off while Larry was pumping the oil. He was just glowing that he could participate in our good deed. He said we could take all we wanted and even gave us an extra bucket. We drove off with 29 gallons. It was 10:00 pm before we were done with driving and collecting oil for tomorrow, but we had a great time.
Today was just a lovely day--smooth sailing all the way. The veggie oil we got last night was perfect and Larry was able to filter it faster than usual in the warm morning sun. Left at 9:45 am with a full tank plus 9 gallons of WVO. Odometer 200,333. We enjoyed the drive through more Kansas countryside, stopping in Kansas City for their famous BBQ and an old-fashioned frozen custard. Once in Missouri, we stopped at a roadside barn offering Amish goods and bought some fresh picked wild blackberries. We arrived in Bentonville around 8:00, with enough time to cool off in the pool. No problems with the car, no stops for fuel. Literally, it was a free ride!
Today I spent the day doing an on-site consultation helping a woman find a house. And we were successful! We found two houses that could be made nontoxic within her area and price range. Larry went to get the veggie car and drove it from the parking space up to the front of the hotel. But after I got in the car and he started it up again, it began to sputter again, as it had on the mountain a couple of nights ago when it had a clogged filter. It stopped and Larry couldn't get the engine started again. Now what?!?!?!?!?!! I called my client and she came to pick me up, and Larry stayed behind to fix the car. The other night the problem was that the fuel wasn't getting to the engine. The problem today was there simply was no fuel in the tank! The fuel warning light apparently works only intermittently. We thought there was fuel in the tank because the gauge said there was, but it was bone dry. Larry added a gallon of filtered WVO that we had in reserve and it started right up. Larry took the car for an engine oil change (petroleum-based, can't use WVO for this) and then went out foraging for waste vegetable oil. First he went to a Thai restaurant, but the oil was "really gummy looking...full of garbage". Then he went to a Japanese restaurant where the oil was clean and looked really good. He went inside and asked the manager, who was wearing a blue and white kimono, if he could have some of the waste vegetable oil. The manager didn't speak English very well and was scratching his head. He couldn't understand that Larry was going to put the oil in his car for fuel. But when a waiter came over and translated, he said, "Oh, oh, take all you want!" And Larry got 25 gallons. After filling the containers, Larry noticed that one of the thin-walled jugs he used to store the unfiltered WVO was leaking--drip, drip, drip. It had a small hole in it. He poured the oil into another contianer he had and fished a new bucket out of the trash at the Japanese restaurant. He then threw the empty leaky jug into the trash, trading a useable container container for the leaky one. When I finished my consultation, we got on the road. 4:15 pm, odometer 200,750. We drove for a few hours through the beautiful green Ozark Mountains, and stopped for the night in Russellville for a good night's sleep before starting the long drive to Chattanooga tomorrow.
Change of plan! I'm still becoming accustomed to thinking with the needs of a car that runs on waste vegetable oil. In a gas-powered car, if the map says five hours driving time, it can be five hours, but not so with a veggie oil car. Loaded to the gills and pulling a trailer, our car will reliably go 400 miles on a 20-gallon tank of gas, which is about eight hours of driving time. So on a trip like this, for every 8 hours of driving, we need to spend 2-3 hours finding and filtering the vegetable oil. It's a nine-hour drive from Bentonville to Chattanooga--no way could we make that in one day, or even one day plus a few hours driving the night before. So we rescheduled our Chattanooga appointments and decided to stop in Nashville and spend a rest day there tomorrow. We've now driven 2162 miles since we started in Pasadena. We left around 9:00, odometer 200,890. We had a half tank of gas and some veggie oil that needed to be filtered. Larry wanted to get on the road, and decided to filter the oil at lunchtime, rather than do it in the morning and again in the evening. The plan was to stop in an interesting place where I could walk around while he filtered the oil. We stopped in Little Rock AR to get more maps and guidebooks and go to the bank, but it wasn't lunchtime yet so we didn't filter oil. Too bad! It was another long stretch of nothing but farmland all the way to Memphis. But that was too far. By 1:30 we were starving, so we pulled off at Forrest City AR, a dusty little country town with an air-conditioned southern food buffet right by the freeway. Larry ate quickly and went out to filter oil in the hot sun. After lunch I went to the car to get a book, but it was just too hot, so I went and sat in a rocking chair on the porch of the restaurant. Even in the shade, my clothes were soaked with sweat, and Larry was out in the blazing sun. The filtering took about an hour and a half, and when we finally drove off, Larry said, "Don't ever let me do that again!" Lesson: On a long trip, consider when and where you will need to filter more oil. Pick a cool, shady place on a hot day. Don't wait until the last minute. Once the car was full of fuel, and we were crusing along with air conditioning and full cups of ice and water, the drive was very pleasant through Tennessee. Lots of trees and beautiful countryside. After stopping for dinner, we arrived in Nashville around 9:30 pm, just in time to cool off in the hotel pool before it closed.
After sleeping in and a walk in the hotel pool, we spent most of the day in Nashville today. We went to a shopping mall because we wanted to buy an altimeter (an instrument that measures elevation above sea level) so we would know how high in the sky we were driving. After all the mountains in Colorado, we were curious about elevation. We didn't find an altimeter at the largest outdoor store in Nashville, but the mall was great, and lots of stores were having half-off sales, so we were able to get some clothing items we needed at great prices. We got on the road at about 4:30 to head for Chattanooga. Odometer 201,375. All went smoothly until about 6:30, when, again, the engine was slowing down going up hills..."A symptom of a clogged filter," Larry said. There are three filters on this car, which need to be changed at different times. One of them is a filter Larry installed which uses a roll of toilet paper as the filter. It needs to be changed every 1000 miles, and the 1000 miles had come and gone. So we pulled off the road into a gas station and Larry changed the filter by installing a new roll of toilet paper. I read a book. It took about a half an hour, only because Larry had to wait for the filter to cool down before he could touch it. Once we had a working filter, the remaining miles into Chattanooga were uneventful. We admired the beautiful rolling hills full of green trees as darkness fell. We arrived in Chattanooga and had dinner. But as we just passed into the eastern time zone, we lost an hour, so by the time we arrived the pool was closed. Ah, well, pool in the morning...
Today we just stayed in Chattanooga, as we had a television interview in the morning and I had a consultation in the afternoon. Larry got up early and filtered the remaining oil we had, then cleaned up the car for the interview with WRCB, Channel 3, the NBC affiliate here in Chattanooga. It was aired on the evening news.
After the interview we went for a walk in the pool, and drove to my consultation. A woman wanted me to look at her house that had been contaminated due to an incorrect pesticide application which had made her sick, look at her rental house, and make suggestions on how to heal from her multiple chemical sensitivities. It was a beautiful drive through the countryside to nearby Lookout Mountain. The sky was grey and it was drizziling, the clouds only adding to the charm of the scenery. To get there, we drove from Tennessee, through Georgia, and into Alabama and crossed a time zone within the 60-mile drive. As we were driving the 60 miles back, we were discussing what to do now that we had finished all our professional obligations when the phone rang, with another request to be on television, in Atlanta. So now the challenge was to find more oil and get to Atlanta by tomorrow afternoon for another interview. When we returned to Chattanooga, we went to a car parts store and bought the new filter that needed to be changed, then set out to look for our next tankful of oil. This was the most difficult hunt so far. We took out our GPS and started driving to the closest Asian restuarants. #1. restaurant was not thereWe were out of Asian restaurants, so we started looking a Mexican places. #7. restaurant out of businessWe drove by a Japanese restaurant. #9. Oil was behind a locked door that said "employees only"We drove by a donut shop. $10. there was no oil container.All of a sudden, right in front of us was a Chinese restaurant painted bright green. Both of us saw it at the same instant. "Look, Larry," I shouted, "there's a Chinese restaurant!" It hadn't been listed in our GPS. #11. The oil was just sitting out in the container behind the restaurant.Larry took a look and it was good. He went in and asked and they were happy to give it to him. We got 22 gallons--more than a full tank and enough to drive to Atlanta and beyond. All in all, it took about two hours to get the oil, twice as long as usual. Another lesson learned. It appeared that the oil in some of the containers had been collected that very day. So find out what day of the week the oil gets collected where you live, and don't go looking for oil that day. In fact, the best day to go foraging for oil is the day before the collection, when the containers are nice and full. By the time we were done collecting oil it was dark and late, about 9:30. So we had dinner, but missed our evening walk in the pool again. We fell into bed, tired, but happy to have had another good day.
Larry got up early this morning and filtered about half of the waste vegetable oil we got last night and put it in the car, while I wrote and posted the next installment of this story and went for a walk in the pool. We got on the road at about 10:30 with almost a full tank of fuel. Odometer 201,672. Larry wanted to get on the road, so we didn't have breakfast, and planned to have lunch in Atlanta. We drove south on I-75 to Atlanta, with plenty of time to arrive at the Fox5 television station for our interview. Everything was fine until we approached Atlanta and we entered the address in the GPS. The street wouldn't come up in the GPS! It's a major street, several miles long, and it wouldn't come up in the search. So we had to buy a paper map and find it and figure out where we were--I had to use my old-fasioned navigation skills! On top of this, the freeway was closed for repairs, so we were detoured through downtown. Traffic was just stopped for blocks. It took almost as long to get across Atlanta on local streets as it did to take the freeway from Chattanooga. It was hot and humid and we missed lunch sitting in the traffic. But the veggie car did just fine. Didn't overheat or anything. Despite the obstacles, we arrived early for our interview and it was the best one yet. It aired on the 10 o'clock news.
It took almost two hours to do this interview. By the end we were hungry and exhausted from the heat. We continued driving down 1-75 to Macon, where we stopped for the night and finally had a meal and a refreshing walk in the hotel pool.
Again, Larry started the day with filtering more of the waste vegetable oil that we had collected on Friday night. This gave us a full tank, on which we could drive about 400 miles. The mileage from Macon to Clearwater was 399 miles. We left at 9:45. Odometer 201,900. Stopped for breakfast on the way. We continued down I-75 with everything going smoothly with the car. The road was completely flat--no mountains or hills to go up and down--so we were able to cruise along at about 65 mph. Around noon we were discussing where to stop for more waste vegetable oil, when suddenly, in the middle of Georgia nowhere, with no Asian restaurants for miles on the GPS, I saw a big sign that said "Chinese Buffet." We took the exit and found the restaurant. It had good oil, but there was a language barrier. The person Larry talked with didn't speak much English and there was nobody to translate. Larry just couldn't communicate what he wanted. We stopped in Valdosta, Georgia for lunch and went to a very popular traditional Southern buffet that was packed with locals, then continued on and crossed over the Florida border around 2:30. We had about a half a tank of fuel and didn't want to be running out after dark, so we decided to stop in the next city that had Asian restuarants to collect more vegetable oil. That turned out to be Gainesville, a college town with plenty of restaurants. We used our GPS to find Asian restaurants. The first one was a Vietnamese restaurant, but they didn't have an oil container in the back. The second restaurant, about a mile away, had great oil, so Larry went in and asked if we could have about 10 gallons, which was all we needed to get home. The manager immediately said OK without any hestitation. Today it took less that half and hour to find and pump the oil. Rather than take time to filter the oil and then drive another three hours home, we decided to just take a rest and spend the night in Gainesville. We went in the pool, had a nice dinner at one of those Japanese restaurants where you sit around the grill and watch them cook your food, and just finally got to lie in bed and do nothing for a change. Tomorrow we'll drive home.
Today is our 21st anniversary of being a couple, the day we count as our "real" anniversary. After I took a walk in the pool while Larry filtered the WVO he collected yesterday, we hit the road at about 9:30. Odometer 202,169. We cruised effortlessly into Clearwater, making good time...about 60 mph all the way. Arrived home. Odometer 202,324. All in all, we traveled 3,522 miles and collected 138 gallons of waste vegetable oil enroute. Adding this to the 15 gallons we started with and having a few gallons left at the end, we drove 3,522 miles on about 150 gallons of waste vegetable oil, plus 7 gallons of diesel, for a total of about 22 miles per gallon. That was with the car completely full with luggage and moving boxes, towing a trailer with veggie oil and filtering paraphinalia, and running the air conditioner most of the way. It was fun! We were wondering if we hold some kind of record for this and found that a few others have driven across America and other countries on veggie oil too. Here are links to their stories: * Friesen Fritter Fired Fossil Fuel Free Blog Across America Two friends drive across America carrying used veggie oil left over from a church fry. * Vegetable oil fuels car on Argentine trip Family drives 11,000 miles from California to Argentina, collecting waste vegetable oil along the way. * Trip Across Britain in Veg Oil Car No trip details, but it's been done. * Greasy rider fuels Mercedes with vegetable oil Writer has driven twice across the country, but no details about the trip. * Running a Diesel Engine on Vegetable Oil Man has driven over 200,000 miles in his veggie oil van over last seven years.
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Our veggie car adventure actually started on Sunday, when we took our car to the Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena to show it to whoever might be interested. We had sent out some press releases, and it was announced in the #1 Pasadena paper, the Pasadene Star-Tribune, and the #1 Los Angeles TV station, KTLA, showed up too and interviewed Larry. Lots of people stopped and asked questions as they where coming or going from the huge flea market held once a month at the Rose Bowl, and some other veggie car owners came by too. It was interesting to see that the reaction to the car was either disbelief or an immediate "I want one!"