There is a dilemma brewing in the offices of the Great Circumnavigation of the Lower Forty-Eight Motorhome Voyage headquarters.
Employing our already cheap attempt at some sort of legitimacy by using one of Shakespeare’s writings in our blog title, “Much ado about nothing” we will further this low-brow way of expressing ourselves by saying,
“To drive, or not to drive, That is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fuel prices, Or to take arms against a sea of petroleum retailers, And by opposing them? To stop, to drive no more….
Well, with the current state of affairs in the world and its effects on the petroleum industry, this may, or may not be the time to embark on our terrestrial voyage.
To better get a grasp of what this adventure may cost us, I whipped out my trusty Excel Spreadsheet so that I could fill in the blank little boxes with some numbers and the best part is that I could color code them to my hearts delight!
I started with a Base.
The Base is what it would have cost us using the Before Prices.
In my mind, you can’t look at the New Total Cost when evaluating this sort of thing. You need to look at the difference between the New Total Cost minus the Base Cost because the only other option would be not going based on the original Before Cost and since we had already decided that we were going to do it, our final decision needed to be based on whether we would want to spend the additional dollars.
Not the already-decided Original Dollars.
Get it?
Ok. Now I calculated the milage of each leg of our journey, arriving at a total of about 7500 miles. We get between 8 and 10 miles per gallon, so using the lower of these two numbers we will use about 950 gallons of diesel fuel.
Then I went out in fifty-cent increments and calculated the cost (topping out at $7.00 per gallon) attempting to put a dollar number on our usage.
It’s a lot!!!
But not enough to dissuade two not-getting-any-younger-who-may-or-may-not-be-able-to-do-this-in-the-future people!
The only difference for us is the price of fuel.
Everything else stays the same for us.
We are home!
We can eat at home!
We sleep at home!
So, eager readers, have no fear, your vicarious travel companions will do their best to bring you to adventures un-experienced and locations yet-to-be-seen, hopefully without having to cut anything out because it got way too expensive!
Maybe we should get a sponsor 😊
For my last line in this contrived attempt at legitimate literature I will paraphrase Bill’s last line, the ending of the great Romeo and Juliet,
“For never was a story of more woe than the dilemma of whether to stay or to go.”