Gas and the US Dollar

This entry was originally going to be a bunch of notes to remind myself about all the internet searching I've done and what I've learned about travel in Europe. In all my searching and surfing, one thing keeps popping up - THE US DOLLAR SUCKS right now. I've been really good about saving over the past couple of years, but I'm still going to have to budget carefully.

Could I have picked a better time time to travel the world? Economically speaking, the answer is a most definite YES! but I'm going to squash the practical me for a little while and try to do what I've always done - ignore economics... This will be hard, but hopefully I'll just be able to spend then forget I've spent. It's just money... there's always a way to make more. It grows on trees, which after a few hundred million years make coal... it also grows on algae that died a really long time ago and mixed with mud and got heated and compressed to form special money bearing rocks, etc. (oil). I patient, I can wait...

I think it's time to start putting some pictures into this blog for all those visual learners out there.

Here we have Figure 1, taken from http://zfacts.com/p/35.html. This shows the price per gallon of gas steadily rising ever since someone I didn't vote for decided to invade Iraq. We seem to be at an all time high here in 2008. President (I didn't vote for you) is right about 1 unfortunate fact - in today's world fossil fuels are everything... which brings us to figure 2, which directly affects my future expedition.

Figure 2 is from the US department of transportation (DOT) website. It shows a couple of really interesting things. The price of travel originating from the US is at an all time high. Second the cost of travel tends to be a bit cyclic, but from this graph it's hard to tell when the peak cost actually occurs. It looks like the peak prices coincide with what is believed to be peak travel season - summer (at least in the norther hemisphere). It would be nice to know for sure where those peaks are though. Luckily, the US DOT website is really awesome because it allows to download the data used to generate this graph so you can do your own analysis if you wish. Being the data nerd that I am, I put together this little graph (and spent a lot of time rearranging data sets - then had to ask myself why I was so obsessed with a little thing like this... still haven't come up with a good answer for that one). Here's figure 3:
This graph shows the foreign airline price data for 2003-2007 graphed by quart (Q1 = Jan - Mar, Q2 = Apr - Jun, Q3 = Jul - Sep, Q4 = Oct-Dec). Unfortunately, I was right - July - September is when airline prices peak like clockwork. That's a bummer. Luckily I have job when I get back. It's time for me to exit student mentality and enter employment mentality - or just get lost in a foreign country and work my way back to the US (don't worry parents! I'll be fine - call you when I find my new European boyfriend).