so...we know I'm a virgo...right? and sometimes for no reason at all, I just like to...organize things. and bean-count. *cough*

I have really no excuse for what I did.

so I was watching spn this week while I was sick, and I was thinking, man, I wonder how much driving they're actually supposed to have done, cuz it seems like they zigzag all over. and you know, how much do they spend on gas.

so I looked up some timelines on supernatural wiki. and that was nice. and then. I kinda started plugging shit into google maps. and then I started keeping track of it on a blank html page in Dreamweaver. and then. I ended up. with this thing.

that I'm sort of embarrassed to have produced. because. it's so OCD.

Notes and credit on where the information came from and how I set this up are at the very bottom of the page, as is the key for what various abbreviations and fonts mean. but I think the tables should be self-explanatory enough. I haven't done s3 yet because I haven't seen most of the episodes.

--Mel (thatotherperv)

*Jericho, CA appears to be a fictional town (according to google maps), but it can't be further than 500 mi / 8 hrs or it would no longer be in California. For the calculations I split the difference and put it at 250mi each way because I highly doubt they were driving all the way to the Mexican border. It looks like Northern-ish California so 250 is a generous estimate.

**SuperWiki lists Sioux County and Lawrence County, SD as two potential locations for Bobby's home and scrap yard, but near as I can tell, the only Sioux County is in *North* Dakota, so I went with Lawrence. Which makes their little stop-over at Bobby's during Devil's Trap a *hell* of a long way out of their way.

Miles logged: 17,515 mi
Amount of money they had to scam / hustle / whore to pay for gas alone: $4,799.11
How'd I get that figure? Considering they spent most of their time in the midwest, and given the figures on these sites (2005, 2006), I'm guesstimating (*very* rough estimate) average gas cost was $2.59/gallon if they were buying REGULAR. Let's face it, Dean ain't putting regular in his baby. I'm gonna figure he puts mid-grade in when he's strapped (which would be $2.69/gallon) or premium if he can manage ($2.79/gallon), so I'll say they probably spent an average of $2.74/gallon during s1. This is where I pull the Impala's gas mileage OUT OF MY ASS. Forgive me if I'm maligning the poor dear, but I'm gonna get it gets crappy gas mileage. I'm gonna pull out a round figure and say 10mi/ga. which puts us at the above figure.

Note: Most of s2's timeline is iffy because canon gives no dates and few clues, so you can take it or leave it. I used Wiki as a guideline but I stuck with the dates that seemed more concretely canon-based...everything unlabeled just sort of fits in there vaguely somewhere. Also, based on the notes on SuperWiki, I'm disregarding one of the dates given in canon during 2.10 Hunted that places it in mid-December, and I shuffled 2.16 Roadkill per their timeline as well. I agree that these changes make the timing jive better and look more realistic, even though they set aside canon.

* While Harvelle's Roadhouse is never explicitly located, the tourists that arrive wanting food in No Exit are wearing Nebraska t-shirts...if not in Nebraska, it's in the mid-West somewhere.

** Though canon gives us no explicit location for 2.4 Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, they are visiting their mother's grave, so I placed the episode in Lawrence, KS.

Miles logged: 34,125 mi
....are we really surprised they were at each other's throats by Tall Tales? jesus. they crossed the country once a week. doubled their mileage from the year before.
Amount of money they had to scam / hustle / whore to pay for gas alone: $10,032.75
How'd I get that figure? Similarly to how I calculated gas money in s1, except I took the cost of gas from the whole country this time because they were all over the place this season. Figures taken from this site put their very-rough-guesstimated average gas cost of $2.94/gallon during s2. Again, gas mileage for the Impala placed at 10mi/gal

Notes on the creation of this resource:

Firstly, this roadmap follows Sam and Dean, who...let's face it, are pretty much always together. Sam and Dean only. I don't follow anyone else, like John.

Date:
Dates were often lifted from SuperWiki, and mad props to whoever picked through canon to come up with that likely timeline. You have more patience than I. Bold dates are hard dates, given by canon. Italic dates are approximations pretty firmly based on canon. These are from SuperWiki, so if you're curious how those were arrived at, see the appropriate page on that site. They explain their logic. Italic ranges don't mean they took that long to drive that distance, it just means canon clues indicate that this was the window for travel. Vague generalizations are...vague generalizations, often in regular font.

Location / Route:
Locations are all canon, as specific as the show got. If I say a town is fictional, that means google couldn't find it for me, so I'm assuming it doesn't really exist.

The hyperlinks go to google maps, in a connect-the-dot fashion...I googled the route from their last location to their next location even if they were "missing" a while and probably didn't go straight from one to the other. I did this for fic-research purposes.....if you want to give them a detour during one of their time gaps that is geographically accurate (for the truly anal-retentive among us), you can alter their route from the two canon points through your fic location by clicking on the route and dragging it through that third location...you'll see all the towns they would have passed through on the way. Nifty! Geeky.

If there are no canon clues as to the relative location of a fictional town, I gave directions to the center of that state. If there's a clue like, 60 miles from Topeka, I just got directions to Topeka since I don't know which side the fictional town is on.

Did the boys take a direct route from the previous location to this one?
Y - yes, canon tells us they definitely went directly from one job to the other.
P - probably...according to the timeline reasoned out at SuperWiki, it looks as though they had to go directly from one to the other to fit the timeframe
M - maybe...canon's a little ambiguous. they may have, or they may have detoured and done some other work in between.
N - canon is so ambiguous or there's such a large time gap that it seems unlikely they went from one to the other. we don't know where they were in between.

And driving distance and time is...well. Driving distance and time. Displayed in miles because the show takes place in the United States. Drive times taken from google maps, but in my experience those are at a safe granny pace, so it depends on how fast your Dean drives :)

Episodes:
season#.episode#, and titles are shortened to one word for brevity.