It dawns on me that I have a thought that combines the previous two postings — the one about gas prices and the one about people driving to the San Diego Con instead of getting a room. It occurred a bit more than 30 years ago, back when that annual event was called the San Diego Comic Book Convention…or maybe it was still the Golden State Comic Convention. It's changed official names a few times and no one ever really paid attention. It was always just "The San Diego Con" to all.
I had a friend named Bob who was about my age. I was around 22 then. Bob lived here in Los Angeles with his parents. That year, we all decided to attend the S.D. Con and all of us secured rooms in the convention hotel…all but Bob. He declared that we were saps; that he'd done the math and decided it was cheaper to drive down each day than to get a room.
Some figures. The convention was three days then. The rooms were around $18 a night plus tax. Gas was 40 cents a gallon. San Diego was just as far away as it is now, which is around 130 miles. So figure 260 round-trip. Bob was going to drive 780 miles in three days. His car got around 20 miles to the gallon on freeways so…hold on while I call up the calculator. (Before computers, I used to be able to do this kind of thing in my head.)
Okay. Three nights at the hotel was around $60. Driving to and fro cost him about sixteen dollars, plus I think he also figured in what he was saving by eating breakfast and dinner at home. On the other hand, he had to get up each morning at 6 AM, leave the house by 7:00, get to San Diego around 10:00 and then leave again by six or so. Since some of the best portions of the con are in the evening, he was spending 5-6 hours a day on the San Diego Freeway and foregoing about half the convention to save fifteen or sixteen dollars a day.
We mocked Bob for this. Even the cheapest of us — and you know how cheap comic fans can be — thought this was a silly way to save money. (And by the way, he wasn't doing this because he didn't have the loot. During the con, he spent a few hundred bucks on old issues of Captain Marvel, his main passion of the time.) His friends all ridiculed Bob relentlessly for what he was willing to do to save $44.
But I got to thinking: Let's say your car gets around 20 miles to the gallon. Gas was $3.07 a gallon when I filled it up last week. It'll probably be well over four bucks, maybe five by the next Comic-Con International. Let's say it's $4.25. Driving to and from San Diego will therefore cost around sixty dollars. The convention is four days and therefore four nights, and rooms will run around $200 a night. So if one drives back and forth instead of staying down there, an Angeleno could save $740.
Maybe Bob was on to something…