Gas Prices Make Roadtripping Less Fun

Spiraling gas prices are making it hard to enjoy driving anywhere. For years I rarely thought about the cost of gas when choosing to drive. The cost of a fill-up was background noise, just an ordinary cost of living. But now with prices passing $6/gallon in most places around here, and higher in other places...



...The cost of gas is becoming a significant challenge to enjoying driving anywhere.

The pic above was in Lee Vining, California, this past weekend. We didn't buy gas there or at those prices. Fortunately we found gas for "only" $7.09/gal 30 miles down the road in Mammoth. But even the comparatively low price of $5.89/gal at a Costco in the Central Valley puts fill-ups over $100 each for our SUV and is enough to get me grabbing my mental pen-and-paper to work out the cost for each trip.

On our recent three-day weekend trip, for example, we drove 670 miles. At an average price per gallon of $6.35 and average fuel economy of 18 miles/gallon, that's $236. For road-tripping, which for years has always been a matter of "Get in the car and drive!", that's reason to think twice. And maybe not go.

102-- No, 103-- Today

Another heat wave is rolling across the Bay Area. Temperatures reached a high of 102° F (39° C) update: 103° in Sunnyvale today. It looks like San Jose hit 103° only 102°, still enough to edge out a record set for this date in 1973 (per National Weather Service).

I say another heat wave because just eleven days ago I posted about 98° heat. And just four days ago we started a cool snap. Temps didn't rise above 69° Friday. Cool weather continued through Sunday while we were out of town, warming up yesterday before peaking today.

Peaky weather like this is abnormal for the Bay Area. Here in Sunnyvale our average daily high this time of year is 81-82°, and usually the actual weather stays within a few degrees of that. Yet a few days ago it was 12-13° cooler than normal, and today it's 20° warmer. Extreme-r extremes like this are part of global warming.

Hot Times on Memory Lane

One thing that's missing from my post earlier today about the 103° weather is moaning about how hot it is. But that's because I'm not moaning. I had it easy today with an indoors job, working from home, with good AC in my house. I left the AC running all night and through the morning, which was good because by 10am it was already in the 80s outside.

I haven't always had it easy with summertime heat, though. When I grew up in Virginia, near Washington DC, we didn't have AC. ...Well actually we physically had AC, but my parents stubbornly refused to use it in all but the worst heat.

Heat + Humidity = Awful

Worst heat, BTW, wasn't 103° like we had here today. The temps there rarely broke the three digit barrier. But it felt way worse because of the humidity. There's a concept known as the heat index. This chart from the National Weather Service shows what it feels like (i.e., the effect on the human body) when high temperatures combine with high relative humidity:



As you can see in the chart, an air temperature of just 90° combined with 85% relative humidity (common in the area where I grew up) produces a heat effect on the body equivalent to 117° in low humidity. That's what everyone means, whether they know it or not, when they quip about Phoenix or Las Vegas, "Oh, but it's a dry heat!"

"But it's a dry heat!"

I experienced a funny little A-B test on this when I moved out to California years ago. We were driving cross country for 8 days. On the last day we started in Elko, Nevada, in the high desert where the air was cool. In the afternoon we drove through Northern California during what we later discovered was a record setting heat wave.

I stopped for gas around 3pm in Sacramento. I was dressed in trousers because they were appropriate for the weather where I started the day 400 miles away. It was hot out there, but not worse than what I was accustomed to as summer weather. "It feels like 90 out here," I remarked to Hawk.

Moments later we saw a thermometer sign at a bank down the street proclaiming 114°.

114°... But it's a dry heat!


Update: Keep reading in No AC on Memory Lane