Adventures in gas-pumping

When I asked the cashier at the gas station why they weren't allowing customers to pay at the pump, she replied, "Well, some of our customers were getting aggressive with the screens on the pumps, so they're all out of service."

I feel their pain.

We were in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, when people started the crazy panic-buying of gasoline. Our first indication that anything was wrong was when we kept having to swerve suddenly around lines of cars waiting to pull into gas stations. We had about a quarter of a tank of gas left on Tuesday and knew we would need a tank and a half to drive home on Thursday, so we decided we'd better fill up.

Easier said than done. By Tuesday evening, many gas stations in the area were out of fuel, and those that still had fuel had lines stretching every which way, with no attempt to maintain order. It took a while but we finally filled up for some absurd amount of money, which was good because by Wednesday morning, no stations in the area had gas.

On Thursday morning we drove inland for an hour before we saw a station that appeared to be open, and we filled up again in central Virginia, at a gas station that had suffered from overly-aggressive customers and decided to establish some order by directing traffic to specific pumps and preventing line-jumpers. 

In nine hours of driving, the highest gas prices we saw were over $3.00 a gallon, and the lowest gas price was at the station closest to our house--$2.85. A worker there told me they had seen some panic-buying but not enough to drain the tanks, and they never had the kinds of lines we saw in North Carolina.

We're happy to be home again (briefly--heading off to see the grandkids today!) and especially happy to have found fuel when we needed it, because otherwise we would have been stranded. A few more days at the beach wouldn't have killed me, but missing my granddaughter's birthday party tomorrow might have made me mad enough to punch a gas pump.