Wrinkly Bits
A Blog by Gail Cushman and Cowboy Bob
Originally posted 1/5/26
We are on the road again, this time to California for a solemn event, a funeral, not an adventure. One day last week I said to Cowboy, “We have a lot of Frequent Flyer miles right now, so why don’t we fly. It won’t cost much, and we’ll get there lickety-split and I won’t miss writing my weekend blog.”
“Nope, I want to drive,“ he said, jangling his keys in front of my face. “Gas prices are down, and it’ll be a welcome break from this boring warm winter, good outing.” He was right about the gas prices, they had plummeted from a few years ago, to around $3.30, depending.
When we drive, we stop a lot. Gail needs a bathroom break. Cowboy needs coffee. Gail needs another bathroom break. The list goes on, but we get wherever we are going in due time. Maybe one or two more bathroom breaks, but who’s counting? (Before I met Cowboy I could count the number of times on one finger that I peed at the side of the road, now I’m into all of my digits, two, three times over.)
So we drove. We saw lots of things, mostly cows and sagebrush, quite a few verdant farms and brown hills. It’s always fun seeing new things. About the time we got to Nevada, I started counting billboards advertising for lawyers. They ran in groups of four or five, all promising the best legal counseling within the State of Nevada, which begs the question, “Why do so many people in Nevada need lawyers?” But I digress, this blog is about gas prices.
So, gas hovered around $3.00 a gallon in Montana, a little up, a little down, but it was pretty standard. Idaho jumped up a bit, about $.30 because they like to pay more (just kidding), and when we got to Utah, they dropped. Every mile, all the way to $2.03/a gallon (if you paid cash, that is). $2.09/a gallon if you used your credit card. We stopped for gas a lot in Utah, each station lower than the one before. Nevada jumped up to about $2.50, and Cowboy said, “We know California is going be higher priced, so we’ll stop in Jean, Nevada, the last place before we would hit California. That should be cheap,” and we stopped at a huge truck stop named Terribles. The first clue was that there were no postings of the cost of gas on the pumps. We looked around, trying to see how cheap the gas might be, Maybe we would hit the jackpot, and it would be under $2.00, something I could really write home about.
$4.59. It was something to write home about.
“Are you kidding me?” Cowboy said. “Let’s skip the gas and find the donuts.”
Terribles had donuts, Four cases of Krispy Kreme, and we grabbed a couple, then put one back. $4.00 per donut. Yikes. We didn’t need a donut each, anyway.
We used two of their 60 bathrooms, and were back on the road in a jiffy, We are in Southern California, amid millions of cars and prices of everything are higher than at home. It was raining, the song lyrics “it never rains in southern California…” ran around my head as Cowboy dodged the angry Prius and moved out of the way of the band of Teslas on the loose. He shook his head in wonder as all these “Dry Land drivers” hit their brakes and slowed to a crawl as a puddle appeared before us. Big Red just kept plodding along and soon we arrived, started hearing from relatives and getting our minds right. But first, the game of the year, Monday night in a bar, far from home… “First down, Bobcats…”
