Why gas is cheaper in New Jersey
12/19/2007 08:18 Filed in: Road Trips
So across the street from our hotel - not three hundred feet away - is one of our favorite barbeque joints: Famous Dave's, this one the East Brunswick place. It's all good, right?
Not so fast! This is New Jersey, the home of the Jersey Barrier, a place where the government seems to think that no person alive is capable of turning the steering wheel to the left for any reason. Down the middle of the highway, looming and unbroken, runs that ugly concrete barrier that graces every major road in the state. To get to that Famous Dave's, to cover that 300 feet, involved almost three miles and six minutes or more. To get back across the street to the hotel was four miles and nearly ten minutes. If you missed the sneaky entrance to the parking lot because of the endless traffic streaming from the ramp off route 18 right before the place, that four mile return became ten miles and took damn near half an hour by the time you ran through the whole stinking loop again!
Want to get gas? Five mile round trip to THAT gas station right over there. Move to another hotel for the extra night I tacked onto the trip? Something like ten miles, a half hour in heavy traffic, to get to and back from a Comfort Suites that I could SEE from the intersection I started at.
I would go stark raving insane if I had to put up with this every day. I kept asking the guys how the hell they live with it, and they just said that you get used to it... and that's why gas is cheap in New Jersey!
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