I lost track of how many coming of age films I enjoyed during my coming of age that included some character that vaguely resembled John Belushi yelling “road trippppp.” This summer, however, I’ve been reminded nearly every week of how rare that cry has become.
Price pressure at the pump had many more Americans enjoying “staycations” than ever before. In fact, early in the summer, official reports showed travel actually down by nationwide for the first time in over six years. The AAA motor club reports that they expect the trend to continue over the upcoming Labor Day weekend. They forecast nearly 0.9 % fewer trips of 50 miles or more will be taken. That would be the sharpest decline in nearly eight years.
However, the travel drought in America may ease a bit. It may be possible since most parts of the country have enjoyed a minor but persistent drop in gasoline prices over the past three weeks. For many of us, it may indeed be time to hop in the car and take in that last summer festival, or trip to the lake that your family needs.
There are three different online calculators that can help you determine just how much you may need to pay in fuel to take that trip. Armed with the information from any one of them (or all three) ahead of time, you can relax and enjoy the bright blue skies and open road.
BUT WAIT! Before you rush off to input your trip plans, there are a couple of caveats we need to pass along. All three of them, as you will see, will give you slightly different data. None of them alone is likely to answer your question as accurately as you would like as a result. So take their numbers with a pinch of salt and plug them in to your own ongoing gas mileage calculator at home and keep an eye on your in-car calculator to make the adjustments you need for personal accuracy.
The first site online gas mileage calculator we’d like to recommend lives at the AAA site;
http://www.fuelcostcalculator.com Using this calculator is easy enough. You simply input your starting and ending cities along with your make, model and year of manufacture for your car and they’ll tell you what you can expect to spend…sort of. Drawbacks here include the fact that you can only choose major cities as beginning and end destinations. Also, you can’t enter a car’s true age over 10 years.
Las weekend I drove my eldest daughter back to school in Columbia, MO. We live a little north of Rockford, IL and I drove a very old 1995 Toyota Camry (I love it still). I was forced to use Chicago, IL as my closest large city starting point and St Louis, MO as the end point. Unfortunately, that difference meant my trip figures fell short of reality by nearly 95 miles.
I noticed while planning my route on my favorite map site, www.mapquest.com that they now have a button on the top for “gas prices.” It showed a may of my area with a couple of local prices called out for me. As handy as that was, I liked the “gas calculator” link underneath it even more. It popped up a little window that let me input the number of miles in my trip (that I got from their driving directions) and a price per gallon. From that it gave me a total I could expect to spend. Of course, I had done all the work, finding the miles and entering the prices. Also, I wasn’t able to include my car’s mileage figures (which I know are above average).
The third trip calculator aide that’s out there is a site you may already be familiar with. It’s called www.GasBuddy.com and it will let you input the city you plan to visit and find out what the price of gasoline or diesel is there. That’s the other part of the equation I needed for near accuracy on the Mapquest calculator.
Hopefully this combination of tools will help you determine that one final summer road trip is indeed within the budget. We all deserve a little break before the prices begin to climb again, as they are expected to do as the year ends.
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