For our latest math project we had to plan a road trip across the continent (or across the street) and calculate all the time and expenses. The project was a worksheet with questions involving the trip and how we would approach it. The premise behind the trip is that MTV has given us $10,000 to pay for a road trip anywhere in the continent. They will televise the event and some companies may offer to sponsor us if they have their products placed in the show. We can bring along some people if we want company or we can go about he entire thing by ourselves. We also had the option of choosing what hotels we would stay in and what we would drive in.

For the route I decided that I would travel as far south as I could so I could experience a lot of different sites. I originally intended to it the bottom of South America but because of complications with the map and route planner I was using I ended up only going from my starting place in New York City to Panama City in Panama.

Panama City (Panama)

The trip is 8950 miles long and would take 174 hours of driving. Because I want to save money on my trip I chose to bring a motor bike which is the cheapest of the available choices for fuel consumption. I was able to use the miles per gallon of the vehicle to find that I would need 109 gallons of gas. With the predetermined gas prices this came to $711.20.

I also needed places to eat sleep as well as baggage for my stuff, while staying in 3 star hotels and eating some fast food I was spending 200 dollars a day. I kept this down even more by using plastic bags for luggage.

Taking all of the costs of this trip I needed to plan out how long it would be, if I wanted to be out as long as possible I would need to get as close to the 10,000 dollar budget as possible. Multiplying 222 by however many days I want I was able to figure out how close I could get to the budget eventually hitting $9990, only 10 dollars from going over budget. I also made a graph of how much it would cost me per day.

On this trip I would have the chance to see many cool sights and explore the landscape when I’m not driving, I’m not making any detours so it will mostly be stuff alongside the highway. The first thing that I thought about was going past New Orleans as it wouldn’t affect the time of my route too greatly and I would be able to see all of the interesting places in the city. They have a pretty big amount of jazz so I would be glad to go see some of that.

I would keep driving across the highway until I would hit the broder between the US and Mexico and this would be the first of many border crossings while on this trip.

Going down through Mexico would be a very enjoyable part of the trip as I have been there before and would happily do it again. I would probably do some kayaking considering how close I get to the ocean and it would be nice to meet people and see some cool sights.

after going through Mexico I would end up crossing through Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua  and Costa Rica before reaching the country of Panama. All of these country’s would have interesting locations and towns for me to explore and I would spend a lot of time kayaking. There I would drive down to my final destination where I will stay for a few weeks which is Panama City.

Now, I do have a bit of extra cash to spend as we had to look at three sponsorships. I took a look at the chart prices and after making a few equations completed a graph on how much each would pay over the coarse of my trip. Coca Cola was really good in the short term with the equation being 6X+104. Pepsi was well rounded with and equation of 10X+60 and Snapple was bad short term but amazing long term with an equation of 22(x)-228. Because of the length of my trip I had to choose Snapple and gain $762.

I would probably spend the $762 dollars from Snapple on a new kayak which I would atempt to bring back with me to NY. It would probably go in the side car. The kayak would cost around $493 so I would have a bit left over to spend on a new paddle and other accessories like that.

This was one of my favourite posts to write as it was something intresting and other than including the math it was up to me what I did. I enjoyed this project a lot and I would want to do more like it in the future.