Carey's Playground

June 4, 2008:

I think the first thing people close to me will say when the read the title to this entry is: "But Carey, you ride the bus everywhere!  Why would you care about gas prices?"

While that may be true, one of my favorite pastimes is random "go nowhere stop anywhere" road trips.  Nothing is more liberating than just going out on the open road and just seeing what there is to see.  A lot of my hobbies are centered around seeing stuff I wouldn't normally see, like birdwatching (parks), geocaching (landmarks & parks), and county counting (remote landmarks).

But lets assume for the sake of easy math that gas is at $4 a gallon.  Now say I want to spend the weekend after my first final doing a county-counting road trip (when it might actually be more than $4 a gallon).  Considering that county-counting is mostly highways and not freeways, a good pace is about 600 miles a day.  I base this on the fact that 1) I want some time to stop to see landmarks, geocache, etc. and 2) It's boring to drive in the dark.  I could no-so-easily cover 1000 miles a day if I threw these two points out the window.

Now given this 600 mile a day estimate, in my fuel-efficient Civic at 30 miles a gallon over two days, that's 40 gallons of gas.  At $4 a gallon, that's $160, just for two days of driving.  That's also not including the inevitable hotel cost for Saturday night.

Since I only get $200 a month in pocket money, it's not in my budget for now :(

Now had the gas been at $2.50 like it was last summer, it would of cost $60 less!

Going back even more, had it been $1.25 like it was when I was a teenager, it would of only cost  $50 for the entire weekend.  Good times!

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