Fill 'er up!

Yesterday I had to fill up the gas tank. $45.25. It was a touch over 14 gallons at $3.21 each. The good news is that it has been more than three weeks between fill-ups. The bad news is that that with the new bouncing baby boy, I will be driving the other two kids to daycare for the next two weeks. That means I will be having these $45 fill-ups about once a week. Ouch!

This helps me to realize the importance of riding a bike for the short trips. I head to the grocery store at least twice a week. Each one of those trips is two miles. The weekly trips to church are a shade over 10 miles. Handel's Ice Cream is about a six mile round trip.

I plug the totals into The Bike Geek's calculator and come up with the following numbers:

Money not spent on gas: $42.84
CO2 not released into the atmosphere: 269.28 pounds

The money not spent on gas seems a bit low. The math works out perfectly when computing my average MPG. My problem is that before I made the conscious effort to park the car and ride the bike, I was filling up about every seven to ten days. Now, the time between fill-ups has doubled. I have heard that short trips use more gas. My totally unscientific findings here seem to have proven that.

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