So gas is getting rather expensive. I just paid $3.70 per gallon. Yeah, I know, it could be worse. People in other parts of the world are probably laughing their asses off at us Americans complaining about gas prices. That doesn’t change the fact that we’ve built our economy and way of life on the assumption that gas prices would be low indefinitely. Well, apparently indefinitely means 2008.
We’ve definitely been altering our activities to cut down on gas consumption. I wouldn’t say we’ve made any drastic changes but we also don’t drive the really large SUV’s so getting 24 mpg keeps us from feeling too much impact. The fact that I work out of the house most days has also really kept us shielded from the impact. The one place that I definitely notice the price of gas is when we drive out to the lake house. It’s costing us about $30 to get there and back. (Begin playing your imaginary violin for us now). Overall, the price of gas hasn’t really been too tough for us for a few reasons, some of which I mentioned above. Here are the things we are doing that have kept us somewhat shielded from the impact:
We do have an 850 mile trip coming up in July. In order to minimize fuel consumption we’ve decided to carpool with my mother and aunt. None of us have a car that we’d really like to drive that far so we’ve decided to share the rental cost of a minivan for the trip. I did some shopping around and was able to rent a new Dodge Caravan for $295 total. That gives us unlimited mileage and a 6 day rental. I found that Enterprise rental had the cheapest rates BY FAR. I checked a couple other companies and they wanted over $650 for a similiar rental. Anyway, by all of us sharing in the cost of the rental and gas, we’ll each save quite a bit of money as compared to driving separately. Another bonus is that we can share in the driving which should make the trip even more pleasant.
Are you feeling the impact of higher gas prices? What changes have you made?
I am playing my violin. Wish we had a ‘lake house.’ :)