Energy Musings - June 4, 2026
We had an interesting trip between Texas and Rhode Island. The economy is healthy, judging by the volume of rubber from recapped truck tires that were destroyed on the highways.
Texas To Rhode Island: Economic Views From The Road
It’s spring and time for our annual migration from our Texas home, now several hundred miles north of Houston, our home for 50 years, to our summer home in Rhode Island. Depending on the weather, traffic conditions, and accident disruptions, the drive can take two or three days. We planned for three days – two nights on the road – to drive the 1,723-mile-long trip according to Apple Maps.
We always adjust the route to avoid crossing the Hudson River via the George Washington Bridge. We deviate from the route that all the navigation systems send you on to one that takes us across the Tappan Zee Bridge (we still use the old bridge name rather than the Governor Mario Cuomo Bridge), and the Cross Westchester Highway to I-95 at the New York/Connecticut border.
To get our navigation systems to show us that route, we have to add the Tappan Zee Bridge as a stop. Therein was the mistake we made that made our drive more challenging than we had planned. The punch line is that we decide where we will stop for the night when we stop for dinner. We decide how much longer we want to drive, which lets us search hotel apps for a room. Sometimes, it has been a problem due to college graduations or other events that can book up rooms in certain locations.
As we sat at the Cracker Barrel dinner table in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the navigation app told us we had only 200 more miles to our home. Since it was only 6 pm, it seemed like an easy drive that would have us in Rhode Island around 10 pm. Therefore, we opted not to book a hotel room.
As we drove I-78 through Pennsylvania and neared New Jersey, it dawned on my wife that the app ended our trip at the Tappan Zee Bridge, but we still had another 160 miles to our house, which had not been accounted for at dinner. At that point, we decided to drive the rest of the way rather than try to find a hotel that late. We arrived at our summer home at 1:15 am! Fortunately, we only needed to unload our car into our garage, except for the contents of our traveling refrigerator, before we could go to bed.
We found the drive relatively trouble-free except for a rainy Saturday morning in eastern Tennessee and Southwestern Virginia. We were surprised that gasoline prices were mostly below $4 a gallon until we reached the more expensive East Coast states, which are always higher due to higher state taxes and distribution costs. Our most expensive gasoline purchase was in Pennsylvania, where we paid $4.39 a gallon. When we arrived in Rhode Island, signs advertised gasoline prices at $4.45 a gallon.
We always watch gasoline prices at the five service plazas along the Connecticut Thruway (I-95), as they often reflect differences in the local cost of living. Four of the plazas are across the highway from each other. Only the southernmost service plazas are located differently – eastbound in Darien and westbound in Stamford. The other four plazas in Connecticut, moving from south to north, are in Fairfield, Milford, Branford, and Madison. The prices were interesting. They started at $4.85, and then were $4.65, $4.69, $4.65, and $4.59. While high, the price pattern was similar to what we have observed many times – the most expensive gasoline is in wealthy Fairfield County next to New York’s exclusive and expensive Westchester County.
Our eating habits remained the same as usual. On the first day, we stopped at a McDonald’s in Arkansas for lunch and were pleased with the restaurant’s cleanliness and the speed of service. That evening, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel just beyond Memphis, Tennessee. We were interested in what our dining experience would be like, given last year’s controversy surrounding Cracker Barrel’s CEO and the planned changes to the business. We followed that meal with lunch and dinner stops the following day to check our impressions from the first dinner.
We found the menu was simpler, less cluttered, and less confusing. The food quality has improved. What remained inconsistent was the service, but that may be a function of staffing and overseeing issues at the individual restaurants. At the first Cracker Barrel, the waitress was stressed out because she appeared to be handling half the room’s tables. My wife’s order was only half of her normal serving of French toast. When she brought it up with the waitress, the waitress didn’t understand the issue. She later came back and said she should have asked whether my wife wanted two or four pieces. My wife got the other two pieces. We chalked up the problem to the waitress being stressed over how many customers she was serving, although it may have been a training issue. Since we don’t know how long she had been a waitress there, we cannot determine the reason for the misorder.
With my dinner order, we never received the normal cornbread muffin and biscuit, but by the time we realized it was missing, it wasn’t worth asking. At the next two Cracker Barrel stops, the service was better. My wife received four slices of French toast. I had blueberry pancakes with blueberry compote instead of maple syrup. At our third Cracker Barrel stop, my wife ordered the blueberry pancakes but got maple syrup instead of blueberry compote. I got my corn muffin and biscuit with my rainbow trout order. How much of the variation in the dishes was due to how the orders were placed, or to differences in how the restaurant structures its menu, is unknown. However, we agreed that all our meals were an improvement over our experience last year during the chain’s turbulent period.
We were also surprised by our hotel room. We stayed in a Hampton Inn in Cookeville, Tennessee. When we were booking the room, we only had a choice of rooms for disabled people. The room was fine, though the bed was quite low, as it should be for disabled people. What was a surprise was the bathroom. While it had a walk-in shower with handrails and a bench, the sink was in a cubbyhole, and only one of the three lights over the mirror worked, making the area dark. For disabled people, we would have expected more counter space and certainly better lighting. We assumed the light issue was due to insufficient supervision of the room cleaners. The sink area was so dark that it was hard to see what you were doing. We notified the front desk about the sink lighting situation when we checked out.
Traffic during the drive provides insight into the health of the economy. Our route is I-30 through Dallas to Texarkana, connecting to I-40 across Tennessee. That connects to I-81 through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where it intersects I-78 to New Jersey. We then follow I-87 through the state and into New York, cross the Tappan Zee Bridge, and continue through Westchester, where we connect to I-95 in Connecticut and continue to Rhode Island.
These interstate highways are known for heavy truck traffic because they are trade routes connecting regional economies. Construction was encountered on every segment. Some sites have been ongoing for years, although a few are new locations. We guess we will see them for years, too.
Surprisingly, the truck traffic confirmed the economic data showing a healthy level of activity. One measure of this high level of economic activity was the large volume of rubber littering the highway from destroyed recapped tires. We would love to know how often the states clean up their highways, but we have never seen so much rubber on both sides of the highway, and often still on it, as traffic had not pushed it off.
All the rubber reminded us of a stock from years ago that was a high-flyer because it had created the truck tire-recap business, which was growing rapidly as the truck population and mileage increased. We also wondered whether all the lost recaps reflected the trucking industry re-activating older vehicles with aged tires.
In recent years, as the new over-the-road rules on rest periods for drivers went into effect, we noticed how crowded the truck stops and interstate highway rest areas were. Late morning on I-30, we saw a truck stop that was still two-thirds full. At another rest area, we saw that the highway authority had installed no-parking signs along the entrance and exit ramps to prevent the area from being overrun by trucks. As a result, trucks were often seen parked at neighboring highway exits and entrances.
Another truck stop was so overwhelmed that trucks were lining up about a quarter of a mile heading into the stop, and an equal distance along the exit. This was the next truck stop after the one that had installed no-parking signs.
In New Jersey, we were surprised to see two electronic signs telling truckers how many spots were available at the upcoming truck stop. While helpful, we figured it was designed to prevent trucks from driving into a full rest area and then having to leave. We thought this was helpful to the truckers and likely reduced the risk of injury to people walking around the rest area.
While dealing with the heavy truck traffic, we were reminded of an April interview conducted by investment pro Adam Taggart with Craig Fuller of FreightWaves, a price reporting agency focused on the global freight market and high-frequency data for the global supply chain. The reason for the late April interview was that Fuller’s view of the economy had changed. In November, “he had warned that freight volumes had fallen dramatically due to tariff uncertainty and economic sluggishness. A recession in the economy of ‘real things’ looked imminent.” Less than six months later, Fuller was reporting that freight volumes were up, and U.S. manufacturing was on course for one of the best markets in years. The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s GDPNow estimate for 2026 2Q is for 3.0% growth, a very healthy environment, especially given the Iranian conflict and elevated petroleum prices.
We were also interested in the Wall Street Journal article discussing data showing that trucks were driving more slowly to save on fuel consumption due to high prices. We didn’t observe such a trend. We have complained for years about trucks in the passing lane on hills, which cause long traffic backups because they are slow to pass or have to pull back behind the truck they were trying to pass.
Although it took us a couple of days to recover from our ill-planned trip, we made it. Moreover, we found that Cracker Barrel seems to be recovering from its disastrous redesign effort of last year. Most importantly, the truck traffic signaled that the U.S. economy is healthy and growing.