We departed just after 8:00am for the five hour drive home.
The trip was uneventful and we stopped at Yass for an early lunch. Knowing very well that our fuel endurance from Albury to Sydney would be marginal, we stopped at Marulan for fuel.
For us, today was perfect for driving. After leaving Marulan we noted that the wind was either nonexistent or was coming from our rear. Without doing anything special with speed reduction, we noted that the average fuel consumption started to reduce. We are normally happy if we average around the 14.4 litres (per 100k’s) but today the consumption headed down to 13, then 12 and finally as low as 11.2 (we have photographic evidence). We really did not slow down all that much with the maximum speed kept to 90 kph (as per the GPS).
When we arrived home, the city traffic had taken the average consumption back to 12 litres (per 100k’s) which is exceptional.
We have now learnt that we need to carefully plan the timing for any trip where there are long legs without fuel stops to ensure that we do not travel when there are prevailing head winds. Without the wind, we can probably extend the range by 100 kilometres by probably slowing to around the 80kph mark and that will be without the use of reserve fuel.