We don’t live in town.
Leadville is not the highest town. Though they sometimes claim it.
Alma Colorado is at 10,500. Downhill from me. That’s the closest town.
My house is at 11-2.
Leadville is 10,100. More or less. Big town. Depends on where you measure I guess.
Montezuma is 10,200.
Winter Park claims the highest elevation when they annexed part of the ski area.
Courthouse is somewhere about 9g.
I sometimes carry a significant number of packages; some of the packages are quite large. A smaller car wouldn’t be satisfactory in my cases. Thanks for the idea, though.
I expect to see a distinct decrease in businesses that depend on consumers’ discretionary income, like restaurants. Or maybe restaurants will cater more to a local trade, like they did in the old days. People aren’t going to have as much money to spend, or as much interest in driving any distance at all to spend it.
Don’t forget, the power DOES come from somewhere. Nothing is a free ride.
It’s official: DeathLlama and I are swapping work commute vehicles starting tomorrow. According to MapQuest, round trip to work for me is 15 miles; round trip for him is 4 miles.
Exceptions will be on days I need to go straight to the barn from work and he’s just had his car cleaned, heh.
Ass, gas, or grass–no one rides for free!
Your wish may be granted: SUV Sales, Values Slide
I use my car for normal trips - it’s been getting 39MPG (I have a 50mi/day commute). I use my truck for , err… truck things (it gets 10MPG) like hauling the tractor, hauling dirt, building materials, etc.
I wouldn’t consider selling my truck to buy a car (obviously, I didn’t). So now I have purpose specific vehicles, and have been doing it this way since I bought my truck in 2003.
What sort of car are you driving and is your commute all highway driving or is it city driving? And is the fifty miles you reference a two-way or one way drive? Just out of idle curiosity.
Anyway, when I asked for suggestions, the suggestions I wanted were specifically for a home based business that involved minimal driving.
I have a 2006 Nissan Sentra 1.8l standard transmission. I average 38-40 MPG. My commute is about 7 miles of back roads (35-50MPH speed limit) and 18 miles highway. I tend to drive at 65ish on the highway. My commute is 25 miles one way. I check my tire air pressure regularly, don’t speed, plan braking, etc. I have installed a K&N air filter, but otherwise the car is all stock. I try not to idle at lights - I turn my car off most times if I know the time cycle of the light is going to be 2 minutes.
Home based business? when you find the miracle one, please all of us here know 
I, for one, don’t really care at this point. I’m not moving closer to work - it’s not an option for me. I already combine trips to the store, etc. I carpool occasionally. Whether gas is at $4 or $7/gallon, I’ll still pretty much do what I’m doing now.
My camp is 120 miles from my house (round trip), and that’s about as close as I get to “vacation”. That’s $12.00 at current prices for me to take my car to camp, and at $7/gallon, it’s still only $21.00. However, you can bet the times I will take my truck to camp will decrease substantially.
I’m much, much, MUCH more concerned about heating costs this winter. .
You can drive less, but you can only heat your house so much less before you start to suffer. I have two woodstoves, but still go through about 750 gallons of oil a year between heat / hot water. At heating oil prices of $4/gallon, that means $3000/year to heat my house at current prices. I cut my own wood to heat the house, so there is a lot of labor involved in that, plus labor of keeping the home fires burning (so to speak), etc. Each extra dollar a gallon for heating oil per gallon means $750 additional to heat my house. Crazy stuff.
I have a Subaru outback, as I need AWD to drive up the hill I live on. We usually snowblow our driveway, but a neighbor happened to be driving by with his plow on his big pickup truck and offered to plow. He was sliding all over the place, and went off the side of the driveway. My wife told him to hop in the Subaru to go get his tractor, and he laughed, as the snow was several inches above the bottom of the car. He was shocked when it pushed right through without getting belly-hung, and didn’t slide at all. I’ll never own anything else. A Subaru with good studded snows will go anywhere. I don’t have any need for low range or high towing capacity, so YMMV.
Sometimes I think it helps to gather a little perspective on the situation. I’ve said many times before, that we have 5 cars. 3 are really weekend diversion vehicles and see very little use (1000 miles each, per year, is pushing it.) since they have two seats a piece, are paid for, and there are four butts in the family, they won’t be pressed into commuter service and should be considered off the table.
The remaining two are a Subaru STi (20 mpg, owe $15k) and an Avalanche (14-17 mpg, owe $6k)
Of the two, I’d probably swap out the Subaru for something with an automatic and better gas mileage…but I probably won’t sell either. Why?
Because selling the Avalanche would be stupid. We owe $6k on it, would lose a LOT of money in the trade, and lose the ability to do ANY kind of hauling (we helped a friend move this weekend, just as an example)
Leaving the Subaru. Lets just say in the exchange, that I only lose $3000 in value over what I have in it. (not unusual, the STi is still desired by racer types)
$3000 would take a LONG time to pay back in improved gas mileage. Assume our 22 mile commuter round trip could be done at 30 mpg, rather than 20 mpg. That’s 550 gallons annually with the 'ru, and 366 gallons with the replacement. 184 gallons saved at $4 takes 4 years to break even.
OR. Carpool and your gas consumption nearly halves. Work at home two days a week and consumption drops by 2/5ths. Spending no additional money, we could go from driving 17,000 miles a year to 6600 miles, saving $2300 a year (assuming 18mpg and $4 a gal)
There’s handwaving involved but you better be dedicated to sell a nearly paid off, poor mileage vehicle with plenty of life left in it for one that may or may not serve your purposes and takes 4 years to break even.
(watch while everyone crawls out of the woodwork saying ‘that doesn’t work for me!’ I understand there are folks who have to buy gas or eat. I don’t have an easy solution for that.)
I think what we’ll see is that everything will be more expensive. We’ve gotten used to cheap milk, cheap meat, cheap gas, cheap everything. There’s plenty of notches in the belt to tighten.
Over the weekend, I hit my internal gas price limit, and apparently, that limit was $4.07. I found myself constantly thinking about how much driving I was doing, and resenting every mile.
As a result, I’m back to riding the bus to work most days. My company pays for our bus passes, so by riding the bus every day I’ll be saving an estimated four bucks per day.
Due to stupid policies, most of my work is done at a place that’s about a 40 mile round trip. But regularly, I will have to work at our remote site, wich is closer to an 80 mile round trip.
Were it not for that 80 mile round trip, I would go for a smart car or something in heartbeat.
My wife has an 80 mile round trip as well, every week day.
While we love our house, we do wish we’d bought something closer to the actual work areas. Maybe we’ll move in 10 years, when we’ve got enough equity to actually make it worth it to sell.
Until then, so far it hasn’t impacted us, but I know it will. Not looking forward to that.
I bought a bicycle with my tax “incentive,” and I’ve ridden it to work a total of four times. Last week, though, the hot weather kicked in, I got a cold, and today, it’s raining.
So, we’ll see.
It hasn’t been too bad for us. My office is ten miles away according to GoogleMaps. My wife’s office is on the way so I drop her off and pick her up on my way too and from work.
Come now. Nobody who knows you live at 11,200’ is going to point a finger and tell you that. You’re something like 0.0001% of the population, though. You’re an anomaly.
. . . And even if they did, it’s not “scary”. If that’s all it takes to scare you, I want your life, because it must be pretty carefree.
I talked to a guy last night who just got back from a vacation in Wyoming. He took his family in his large RV - it was around 1000 miles round trip. He says he spent almost $1000 on gas.
I’m looking for some RV manufacturers to buy puts on.
It’s a nice life. But hardly carefree.
The only thing that is “scary” are those people that would say “you don’t need an SUV”. Or a rifle. I pull those same folks out of the ditch.
Haven’t had to use a rifle on them though. 
(i kid, I don’ keep a firearm in my vehicle) Just the tow strap and low-range.
The fact is that many want to tell others how to live or what they should have aggravates me. One time, I pulled out a car and was dressed down for driving an SUV. I saved their ass, on the road to my house (they where blocking it) and they had the temerity to try to give me shit about driving a vehicle that was appropriate for conditions.
They where stuck. I found them. And saved them.
They gave me shit for driving an SUV. Right after I pulled them out. Oh well. People that are truly scared do come up with some crazy stuff. I was gob smacked. They went on there way with not so much as a thank you.
And yes, my wife and I are an anomaly. Very few live at 11-2. But I might be seen driving down in Denver or across the country. We do help our neighbors or lost wanderers no mater how unprepared they are.
Here are others: