Labor Day seems to be going out with more of a whimper than a bang, depending on where you are.
In a lot of metro areas, this evening has the potential to be the worst rush hour. If rush hour normally begins at 4, for a lot of cities it will begin at 1 o'clock and won't let up until well after dark.
It might end up being smaller than that
It's a rare American who will pay less than $2 a gallon this year, ... That said it (gas) is still a small part of the travel cost, and it's tough to tell Grandma you're not going to visit because it's going to cost $5 more to fill up the car.
It's all over the map. Here in the D.C. area, schools don't get out until Thursday, making for a very short travel period.
The real downside of this hysteria is that people hear rumors about outages in other towns and rush out to gas up, thereby increasing the likelihood of gas lines and outages in their own town.
The thing we hit as we head into fall is leaf-peeping, and leaf-peeping takes a lot of gas,
The rates you'll pay depend on the card you carry, the bank that issues the card and the merchant's policies. They all can have varying rates, so the actual cost to you is some combination of those three different aspects.
Really, the economy is the largest factor that's out there.
Thanksgiving's the most intense travel period of the year, when you look at the sheer numbers of people taking to the skies and highways in a short period of time. It makes for crowded, and sometimes treacherous, roads.
