Handy Dandy Useful Travel Tip

One awfully important bit to remember when planning your Labor Day car trip -- DON’T. DO travel on any other weekend but not this one!

Why? 70,000 students return to Boston/Cambridge on this very weekend. Yup. 70,000. How could I have possibly forgotten such hell?

I imagine this is akin to that, probably apocryphal, thing about there being some hormone which enables a woman to forget the pain and horror of childbirth, thus allowing for the possibility of future bairn.

The Amazing Bob and I moved out of mega student-y Brighton/Allston/Brookline about 16 years back. Our neighborhood in East Cambridge was a whole 6 blocks (MAX) from MIT which meant that, if we didn’t venture out of the house on September first, we didn’t feel overwhelmed and invaded.

We’ve been on the Neck (we’re Neckas in the vernacular of the area!) for almost 11 years now. There are a couple of small colleges here in Quincy but they’re mostly commuter schools -- no giant inundation of U Haul trucks, rental vans and pick ups with mega packed truck beds all with cars attached to their trailer hitches.

Thank Bast!

So yeah, it slipped my mind that Labor Day weekend is THE best time to stay off the roads.
Here’s why forgetting this way important piece of info was specifically extra bad.

When Bix and I got up to Hoosick Falls on Saturday (easy peasy traffic -- no delays) I calculated my gas mileage. I’d gone 188 miles on LESS than half a tank of gas -- that’s close to 40 miles per gallon. 98 kinds of awesome! Horace the Silver Beetle was surprisingly not so great on that front (generally under 30 mpg).

As I was cruising down the Pike in the most fab Bix, headed for home, I figured I’d wait to gas up when I got home. Seriously, 376 miles on one tank of gas -- how cool would that be?!

And then, halfway across Massachusetts, bad traffic happened. Vile, appalling, mega fucked up, I’ve-never-seen-it-so-jammed traffic. It was stop and go for the rest of the trip with rare breaks of lightening speed 30 mph (lasting a minute a time).

I was no longer getting the glorious 40 mpg. Of course. Then, close to the Allston/Cambridge exit, the OH-NO-you’re-gonna-run-outta-gas-soon light came on. Theoretically, based on an average of 36 mpg, I could have made it to Quincy before the tank was bone dry. Just. I was down to 4/10s of a tank (Bix actually tells me exactly how much I have left when he’s flashing the OH NO light at me!).

This isn’t the kind of ‘living dangerously’ that trips my trigger -- I exited. Tried to anyway. It took 45 minutes to get through the long line at the exit and over the bridge to the gas station (less than a mile. I could have walked it with one leg tied behind my back in half that time). During that extra long wait as Bix idled, pissing away the last bits of fuel, my panic abated -- I was now close enough that I could push Bix to the station.

We made it. Have I mentioned how much I love this car?