The Price of Gasoline

Like the weather, the price of gasoline seems to be an infinitely useful conversation starter. I remember when my kids were first starting to think about driving and realizing that cars ran on gasoline and that they would have to buy their own gasoline to run their own car one day when they eventually had one--this was a little over 2 years ago. Then the price of gasoline started going up at an alarming rate. They said one day in exasperation "gas is going to be $5 a gallon by the time we're driving!"

At the time I laughed it off; I'm not so sure now that they weren't right. Especially now when you're looking at almost $3 a gallon today.

Last year after Hurricane Katrina hit, and as we were driving to Texas on our only tank of gas, there was no gas to be found in Mississippi at all. If the stations had power, the lines were over a mile long. We were more than slightly worried that we would end up on the side of the road waiting for someone to come rescue us because we were out of gas.

All of these circumstances prompted us to get several 5 gallon gas containers when we returned from our evacuation from Katrina. These containers proved very helpful since gas was pretty scarce in South Mississippi for over a month after the storm. When we did get a ready supply of gas in South Mississippi we were on a price mandated by the governor at pre-storm prices, so that we never really felt that crunch that everyone else did last summer, and were rationed to either $10 or $20 a stop.

All of this to say that Ernesto formed and we filled up our gas containers and bought water this weekend and considered where we'll evacuate and what intensity of storm will prompt that decision. It looks like we're going to be safe--at least the projections now would say so--but the "lessons" we learned from Katrina are still deep in our minds. We'll be like those folks who lived through the depression. Only instead stuffing money in our mattresses, we'll hoard things like water bottles, gallons of gasoline and lots and lots of granola bars!