I can’t remember where I first heard the term ‘staycation’, but I caught myself using that word the other day.  I nearly slapped myself.  Where did that come from?  I’d run into a friend of mine who remarried a while back.  He and the new wife did not honeymoon.  They’d decided last year when they tied the knot that they’d just wait for gas prices to fall a bit and then hit the road for a couple of weeks and see a few sights they’d always wanted to see.  Well, obviously, gas prices have only gotten worse and he said they’d cancelled their plans for this year.  That’s when I dropped the ‘yes, we’re probably just doing the staycation thing ourselves’ line.  Let’s face it, unless you’re willing to travel in a Prius or a so-called ‘Smart Car’ (they don’t make a shoehorn big enough to get me in one of them) you’re probably not going too far this year.  Well, that is unless you’ve got some extra room on the plastic slave master known as your credit cards.  I’ve found that most people I know are doing the same, staying home, eating Cheetos and watching their ridiculously over-priced satellite television.  It’s a bit of sad commentary on the day and time in which we live right now.  There’s a small glimmer of hope on the horizon, with the oil shale production in the Permian Basin and south of San Antonio.  But that’s only if the enviro-Nazi’s leave us alone.  Some stupid little lizard is threatening the Permian Basin fields.  And there are already those who are grumbling to the suits at the federal level about the well fracturing in south Texas.  Get off our backs!  This is Texas.  We’ll do as we please.  The job opportunities are booming down south.  This could spread all over the state, but we’ve got to stay on top of things.  Maybe, just maybe, ten or fifteen years from now, we can finally be truly energy (oil) independent.  Otherwise, we’ll be ‘staycationing’ from now till the end of time.

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