Energy Musings - May 27, 2025
Our annual observations from our drive from our Texas home to our summer home in Rhode Island. We get a chance to gauge the health of the economy and other observations.
Thoughts From the Road To Rhode Island
New readers of Energy Musings may not be familiar with a regular feature we have been writing for at least 20 years. Each year, we travel to our summer home in Rhode Island, a house we have owned for 28 years. The drive typically takes us two days, although sometimes we have needed three days. Occasionally, we have made side trips such as the Bourbon Trail or the Whiskey Trail, extending our driving times.
My job as a financial analyst was understanding what was happening worldwide and how events or trends might impact companies' future revenue and earnings. Therefore, we constantly look for signs of activity that might influence our views about company futures. We have had readers tell us they have become truck traffic watchers because of our observations.
We made our trip on Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. We were surprised there wasn’t more traffic to contend with, given it was a long holiday weekend and warnings of many people traveling. Earlier in the week, we had traveled to Washington, D.C., for an energy conference co-sponsored by the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA). We are a Senior Fellow of NCEA. Flying between Dallas and Washington made us wonder if everyone was flying for the upcoming holiday.
Another measure of the level of travelers is hotel rooms. We never book ahead for a hotel. When we stop for dinner, we look at a map and judge how long we want to drive and where that would put us. Sometimes, it is picking the next major city for our hotel. This time, at dinner, we looked into a hotel on the north side of Knoxville, Tennessee. We chose one we have stopped at before. We knew we could be there at about 10:30 p.m., but because of the time zone change, it would be 11:30 p.m. Booking the hotel reservation online was no problem. More shocking was that we could find parking in front of the hotel. We are almost always on the side or back when we arrive late.
We ate breakfast at 6:30 am, and very few people were present. When we went to load the car, we found only a couple of empty parking spaces, suggesting most people had yet to leave. We guess the hotel was not fully booked, something we found surprising. When travel is heavy, booking a hotel online at such a late time is often impossible.
An interesting observation was the cars with which we were parked at the hotel. There was a row of nine vehicles, with ours being number 8. Every car had a different state license plate. Cars were from Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia. We do not recall ever walking along a line of cars with everyone coming from a different state.
We have recently moved from Houston, our home for 50 years, to Grapevine in the Mid-Cities suburban region between Dallas and Fort Worth. It was founded in 1844. At this location, Sam Houston and fellow Republic of Texas Commissioners met with the leaders of 10 Indian nations. Their meeting negotiated a treaty opening the area to homesteaders and the founding of Grape Vine Prairie. A decade after its founding, the town shortened its name to Grape Vine, and 53 years later, the words were contracted to today’s Grapevine.
The city is adjacent to Grapevine Lake, a large reservoir impounded by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1952, which serves as a source of drinking water and recreation. Grapevine also includes a larger portion of the DFW airport than other cities.
Although our new home is 290 miles northwest of our Houston home, the driving distance to Rhode Island is only about 100 miles shorter - 1,721 versus 1,817 miles. It is still two long days of driving – approximately 25 hours of road time, excluding stops. Our routine is to stop only for gasoline, bathroom breaks, a quick lunch, usually at McDonald’s for their clean restrooms, and dinner at Cracker Barrel, where you can get breakfast all day.
The first McDonald’s visit was a disaster. It was in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. My wife and I noticed the restrooms were dirty, despite signs saying they were checked every 30 minutes. We placed our orders and sat at a table. We watched as the long drive-through lanes remained busy. There were also numerous customers standing around waiting for their orders. At one point, we went to the counter, which had no one working, and confronted a worker running food to drive-through customers who had parked, awaiting the rest of their orders.
The worker said they were working on our order. We noticed an electronic sign showing orders being worked on and those being served. None were being worked on, and the delivery numbers never changed, so obviously the sign was not working. After 25 minutes of waiting, we returned to the counter to ask what was happening. It looked like chaos in the kitchen. A lady with a young daughter was wondering about her Chicken McNuggets order.
Two DoorDash drivers were waiting for orders but couldn’t get an answer. I asked one of them if they picked up orders frequently at the location. She said yes, but had never experienced such a long wait. She agreed with my observation of chaos in the kitchen. It was nearly 35 minutes after we placed our order for two hamburgers and drinks that we got our food. This McDonald’s either has a labor issue or a management issue. Both are challenges, but the former is harder to fix.
Our Saturday McDonald’s stop was much better. The restaurant appeared less busy, which may have been due to the workers' speed. We received an order similar to Friday’s in five minutes. It was delivered to our table instead of being handed to us at the counter.
We always pay attention to gasoline pump prices as they often measure the health of the oil business. With crude oil trading around $60 a barrel, we expected prices to be low. They were. We paid prices for regular gas in the $2.799 to $2.899 a gallon range. That was for gasoline purchases in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. When we reached West Virginia, pump prices jumped to over $3 a gallon. That was the highest price we paid - $3.299. Even in expensive Connecticut, we only paid $3.179. Drivers have to be enjoying the budget relief from low oil prices.
Trucks have always been the bane of our existence. With many highway roads being two-lane, the traffic gets backed up every time an 18-wheeler pulls out to pass a slower truck. The only response is to grin and bear it. And to watch out for the idiot driver who sees any space between you and the vehicle ahead as an opening he needs to fill, even if it means you have to slam on your brakes.
Truck traffic is a tremendous economic signpost. Almost everything you buy today travels on trucks to its final destination. Therefore, when truck traffic is heavy, it usually means a strong economy. We would judge the truck traffic we observed as only slightly above normal. We never encountered long caravans of trucks, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a lot of trucks.
Another measure of truck traffic is to observe how many are parked at rest areas or truck stops just off the highway. The Pilot, TA Travel Center, and Petro Truck Stops we routinely pass on our drives were pretty full, but not overly full as we have seen in recent years. Highway rest stops were always half to two-thirds full, depending on the time of the day. We noticed numerous 18-wheelers parked on the entrance ramps from truck stops and rest areas, suggesting that when these trucks entered the location, they could not find a convenient parking spot. That suggests they were more crowded at earlier times.
Given the over-the-road truck driver rest rules, they must stop more frequently and for extended periods. What we cannot know is the impact, if any, of the upcoming holiday on companies' shipping plans. The bottom line is that we were not overwhelmed by truck traffic, suggesting a cooling economy.
It wasn’t until we were beyond Knoxville that we began encountering the police. We only saw police on Friday at a massive truck accident site in Tennessee. Multiple speed checks were on both sides of the highway between Knoxville and the Virginia state line. Once in Virginia, there were numerous speed checks. We do not recall seeing any police in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Two observations about the highways. First, we guess truck tires are deteriorating, as so much rubber from retreads has come off trucks. We even saw one 18-wheeler with an inside wheel spinning a tire with no tread. We assume the driver had not inspected his vehicle, or maybe he knew it, but it was not crucial for the truck's performance. The second observation was the large number of dead deer. We counted five from the Dallas area to Knoxville. Ten dead deer were found from Knoxville to the Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River in New York. One conclusion was obvious – the highway departments are not cleaning the highways as often as they should.
Before exiting Tennessee on Saturday morning, we observed the immediate aftermath of a terrible accident. At least one vehicle was on its side. All traffic was stopped with the backup stretching for over a mile. We did observe three ambulances and one emergency rescue vehicle heading to the crash site. We hope people were not seriously injured. We also cannot imagine how long it would take for those vehicles to be able to move again.
As we passed the accident, we thought about the near miss we had experienced the night before. A pickup truck had passed us and was in the speed lane ahead of us. We do not know what happened – did the driver fall asleep, was he using his cell phone, or just inattentive, but he pulled to the left and off the road onto the shoulder. He did not seem to brake as he was pulling off the highway. The problem was that the shoulder was narrow and had a 6-12 inch drop-off onto dirt. After bouncing off the road, the truck driver swerved to the right, gunning the vehicle back into the speed lane. Fortunately, we were watching, and after a glance, we determined no vehicles were alongside or behind us. We cut across two lanes into the slow lane and avoided the truck's front end returning onto the road. We don’t know if that counts as one of our nine lives.
As usual, this was another demanding trip, with lots of work awaiting us to settle in for the summer. Based on our observations, we cannot disagree with the economic statistics suggesting the labor market remains tight but that economic activity is slowing. We wonder what we will see during our trip back to Texas in the fall.