As the summer season approaches, I find myself following the price of oil and wondering how the upward trend is going to affect my travel season. The truth is that oil, and the fuels made from it, are a finite resource. The price is going to continue to rise, no matter how many subsidies we throw at it. Period. But this doesn’t spell the end of the roadtrip. (In fact, this may be the dawn of a new “golden age” of exploring America’s roadways.) Here are three ways to keep the pavement rolling under your tires as fuel prices rise.

1. See more, drive (slightly) less. While I’d love to get back out to the Rocky Mountains again this year, I’m considering scrapping that plan for exploring the nearby White Mountains instead. Rather than drone out long-distance milage to get to a far-off destination, I’m going to spend a lot more time getting to know the backroads of western Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. While a lot of the small towns here aren’t considered “destinations,” they all have something to offer, either historical or cultural. I spent twenty minutes with an elderly gentleman as he described, to my friends and I, how the small town we stopped in for breakfast had changed over the years since his childhood. I’d never heard any of the events he’d spoken of and it reminded me how little I really knew about the region within 100 miles of my home. Continue reading “Long Live Roadtrips! Three Ways to Keep Exploring America’s Roadways Through Rising Fuel Prices”