Summer well spent
Paying a high price for valuable lessons on the road of life
By Jennifer Hadley 09/04/2008
I spent my summer spending money — lots of money.
I spent money on vacations and trying to cheer myself up with retail therapy, as the pervasive gloom and doom of the economy weighed heavily on my mind. But I didn’t mind buying ridiculously priced meals or even one too many trendy fedoras. Hey, I’m trying to do my part to inject some life back into the economy.
However, I did realize about midway through the summer that spending money on gasoline flat out sucks. And, like the rest of us, this summer I spent a whole lot of money on gas.
There was my first trip of the summer to Arizona in early June, when I paid $4.59 per gallon to fill up at the Mobil station on Arroyo Parkway and Del Mar Boulevard in Pasadena. That week, according to the Automobile Club of Southern California’s Weekend Gas Watch (aaa-calif.com), prices spiked “at a pace not seen since 2003, bringing new all-time price records.” Of course, the average for the Los Angeles-Long Beach area that week was $4.34, so I had clearly not shopped for the best prices. Live and learn.
Then, by the time I headed to San Francisco in early July, the Auto Club had released its monthly Fuel Gauge Report. This report indicated that gas prices had posted increases throughout Southern California for the fifth consecutive month. That week the average price for regular self-serve gasoline peaked at a monthly high of $4.59. Undoubtedly, I paid 20 cents more than that, just as I had a month earlier, but bargain shopping has never been my forte.
Though I spent what my checkbook proves to be a massive amount on gas earlier this summer, by mid-summer I had learned some interesting, if not particularly useful things about myself. First,
I discovered just how irritated I can become when I’m unable to fill my gas tank all the way on account of the $75 limit when using a debit card. Growl.
I also learned that, being still upside-down on my loan, trading my SUV for a hybrid or more fuel-efficient vehicle is out of the question.
But, as I like to think of myself as a tank half-full kind of girl, there are a whole bunch of things I learned this summer that will surely benefit me for years to come.
First, I will probably downsize from my X-Terra to something more economical as soon as it makes any sort of sense to do so. I learned why so many people love the Toyota Prius. I learned that I’m not nearly as afraid of driving tiny cars (like the Smart Fortwo) as I thought. I learned that clean diesel is a viable alternative to a gasoline-powered car. I learned that taking the Metro Rail is a piece of cake. I learned that if you have house guests visiting and you lend them your car with a quarter of a tank of gas, you generally get it back full. And I learned that walking to the store in lieu of driving is great exercise, particularly when carting home things like wine, eggs and huge blocks of cheese.
Finally, I learned that oil companies must have a wicked sense of humor, which I can’t help but appreciate: Not that we’ve marked the unofficial end of summer and travel season with Labor Day behind us, good gas news finally arrives. Prices are down substantially, falling nine consecutive weeks. In fact, average gas prices leading up to the Labor Day weekend in the greater Los Angeles-Long Beach area were down to $3.98. That’s a drop of 48 cents from the previous month, and a 65-cent decrease from the record high of $4.63 in June.
Naturally, as irony mandates, I took to the skies for my Labor Day trip, so I didn’t benefit from the lower prices. Go figure. All the same, in hindsight, the crash course I took in spending, then saving on gas made for lessons well learned, making mine a summer well spent.
Contact Jen Hadley at jmhadley624@yahoo.com.
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