The price of gasoline

Wednesday, 1:36 pm

By Kate

When you have to be somewhere in a real hurry is just the moment you will realize that your car’s gas gauge is past empty and the engine is sucking fumes.

And when you have miraculously made it to the gas station and have almost slumped in fatigued relief, you realize there is a 6 car line waiting to pull in to the gas pump. And being the seventh car in line is exactly when your car says, “nya nya,” and coughs to a stall. Not to complain, though. Better there than a mile or even two blocks up the street. But it doesn’t do anything for arriving at one’s appointment in anything like a timely fashion.

I hardly had time to notice at the pump, but the sticker shock finally penetrated some time later. The cheap gas is now going for $2.19 here. I’m sure it is vastly more expensive in other places, but $2.19 is still a lot. While my little car doesn’t hold all that much and seems to run a long time on not very much, it still costs me about $15 for a little over a half a tank. When I gazed at the SUV owners sitting in line, I could feel their pain.

If I remember correctly, one of those vehicles holds about 20 gallons and most of them don’t like the cheap gas. So I figure that’s about $45 to fill a tank. And that won’t last more than about 4 days tops.

That would explain why I’ve seen so many SUVs tooling around town with For Sale signs in the back windows. Probably also why I’m suddenly seeing a lot of new small cars around town, many of them hybrids. Conservation by one means or another, I guess.