It looks like gasoline prices will remain below $3.60/gallon for the rest of the summer.  So you can still take that staycation trip up to the lake that you were putting off without having to sacrifice your morning Starbucks until Christmas just to pay for the gas.

I’ve been an avid watcher of the financial channels CNBC and Bloomberg News for many years (as a complete outsider, of course) and the market prices for oil and wholesale gasoline remain “under pressure” as they have done for most of the year.  The oil producing countries are apparently keeping the spigots open and that’s helped the price of oil to drop below $100.00 per barrel in the last week or so despite the problems with Russia.  Adding to the pressure on gasoline prices has been the relatively weak demand here in the US over the summer, which is traditionally the season when demand peaks and prices follow right along.

One of my most memorable family vacations was one summer in the mid-60’s when my parents took my sister Donna and I up north to a lakeshore lodge up near Brainerd.  As soon as we unpacked, I headed straight for the little beach behind our cottage.  The water was so much clearer than the lakes near us in Minneapolis that I was astounded.  We did a little swimming, some canoeing, and my dad and I did a little fishing.  We also visited Paul Bunyan Land, of course, which was a lot of fun.  I’ll always remember the giant Paul Bunyan who said my name over the loudspeakers, and there was a chicken in a special cage that played Tic-Tac-Toe when you put a nickel or dime in the machine.  My mom and I loved that!

I’ve been lucky in that I almost always got along well with my sister.  She tells me we quarreled a lot when I was little, but I have no memories of that beyond occasionally playing tricks on her.  But we never had a problem with each other on car trips.  There was no “stop touching me” or drawing a line down the center of the back seat.  Now that I think about it, many of my favorite family memories involve the half dozen car trips we took together back then.

The longest trip we took was the summer we drove to Billings, Montana to see my dad’s parents.  We went through the Black Hills to see Mount Rushmore, where I got to see the monument and try buffalo meat at the dining hall there that was featured in the famous Hitchcock movie “North by Northwest” with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.  We went as far west as Yellowstone National Park and got to see Old Faithful spout.

It was a long trip and our car didn’t have air conditioning, so stopping for a cold drink and a snack was never far from the minds of us two kids.  At one point going through South Dakota when our frustration and boredom exploded, us kids took the road map to find the next place to stop and eat.  The next likely-looking dot on the map was a place called “Spotted Horse”, whose dot was slightly larger than the others.  It seemed to take forever for us to finally get there, and when we did it the “town” turned out to consist entirely of a Standard Oil gas station about the size of a tool shed with 2 pumps out front topped by the classic glass crowns.  We giggled ourselves silly over that single building on a crossroad calling itself a town.   It seemed to take hours to get there and there was no other town for miles. You probably had to be there.  Thank goodness it was something of a general store, too.  We bought some pop and a bag of Kraft’s Caramels and were on our way again.

A few hours later when we were going through the Black Hills, we hit a slow spot on the highway where traffic was barely moving because some burros were walking along the road and they stuck their noses in through the window looking for hand-outs.  Well, the only thing we had were the caramels we bought in Spotted Horse, and so Donna and I unwrapped a few and started to feed them to the burros.  The burros obviously enjoyed them, but they had trouble chewing the blobs of caramel that had gotten very soft and sticky in the hot car.  It was like a cartoon, watching their jaws work furiously trying to extract the messy treats from their giant teeth.

Both my mom and dad come from Montana, and they both took great pride in bragging to my sister and I about the “blue Montana sky” for years whenever the weather was gloomy, and especially during the months before this trip.  “Oh, you’ve never seen such a blue sky!”  “There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world!”  Of course, we kids were both born in Minnesota, and dear old dad worked for the University of Minnesota, so we were pretty loyal to our home state and were skeptical as kids can be about these tales of the amazing skies over Big Sky Country.  And, having endured a couple of days of cloudless skies over the featureless terrain of South Dakota, as we crossed the last mountain crest and were over the border into Montana, sure as shootin’, the biggest, darkest thunderstorm we’d ever seen rolled over us, complete with blinding flashes of lightning, huge claps of thunder, and a real gullywasher of a downpour.  I don’t think we ever let our parents forget about that day, it was so much fun to tease them.

p.s.  I can’t find Spotted Horse, SD in Google Maps, so apparently its faded away into the dust of the South Dakota flatlands.