Gas Price Crunch: Driving Across America, but Perhaps Not as Much These Days

I guess life could be a lot worse. I am working. A lot of people aren't, and while I have to commute 10 miles round trip to work, it's nothing what other people are in this area. Here in the Hampton Roads area, it's nothing to have a round trip of 50, 100 miles or more to a job; people commute here from North Carolina and the metropolitan area is 70 miles in any one direction. If you are resorting to taking the bus to get to work it could be 2 to 3 hours each way so it is no surprise that the automobile is the primary way to get around.

But a simple 10 mile round trip commute is 50 or more miles a week. If I go to one of the malls in another city, like Norfolk or Virginia Beach it's either 8 miles or 17 miles, respectively. Some malls I don't even go to, like Patrick Henry in Newport News which is 31 miles away or the outlet mall which is 50 miles out. What I can get to I can't even afford, like MacArthur in downtown Norfolk; 4 miles, which is almost walking distance, is overpriced and carries labels I don't need, like Hugo Boss.

Am I cutting back on clothing for those reasons? Um, yeah. What is practical is for me to go to one of two malls here, one of which is "ghetto", for all practical reasons, to the point that some would be afraid to walk through there the other which the architecture is a lot more interesting than the actual clothing they sell. But it's built into a hill so it sort of reminds me of the malls back home.

When I used to go to the outlet mall and realized that I was spending what was then $10 on gas just to get out there and back I figured it may be in my best interests to let that go. Some of what they sold I could find in the stores in town anyway. If I think about working one of the jobs in Newport News, like say for Verizon, I have to take into consideration that it could take an hour and a half to get home, when you figure in traffic. That's easily $7 a day, or $42 or more a week just to get there and back. If you have an SUV with lousy gas mileage that's easily $90 a week.