Can someone offer a better definition of being Reamed?

I just took a trip to Lancaster with my wife. On the way through Mojave w spotted a gas station with fuel for $1.85 per gallon and decided to fill up on our way back through. This, of course, is due to the gas here in Ridgecrest costing $2.39 per gallon. When we went in to pay for the gas my wife was telling the cashier about how much our gas was. She told us that theirs was due to drop even more in the next few days and I (half jokingly) said that if it did that it would be cheaper to run our van near empty and just drive to Mojave to fill up.

Well, being the nerd I am and having nothing better to do in the wee hours of my birthday I thought I would test that theory.

According to Google Maps the distance from Ridgecrest to Mojave is 58.6 miles.

We drive a 1999 minivan that runs between 21 and 26 miles per gallon on the freeway so I went with a conservative estimate of 22 MPG.

At 22 MPG it would take 2.66 gallons of gas to reach Mojave from Ridgecrest.

Our van has a 20 gallon tank on it.

If I were to wait until I had only a few gallons left and then drove to Mojave it would cost me $37 to fill a 20 gallon tank paying $1.85 per gallon.

Driving back would use up 2.66 gallons of gas which I would then replace at the cost of $6.36 if paying $2.39 per gallon.

If you add those two figures together it comes to a total cost of $43.36

If I were to simply fill the 20 gallon tank here in Ridgecrest it would cost me $47.80 to do so.

It turns out that I would be saving a total of $4.44 by driving 117 miles out of my way to fill up my tank.

So, Schwarzenegger, are you planning on doing anything about this? Everywhere I go in California I see gas prices lower than they are in Ridgecrest. I even took several random city samplings on http://www.californiagasprices.com and in every one of them the price of gas was lower than in Ridgecrest.

And keep in mind I used some of the less expensive gas in Ridgecrest (many places cost more) and used a low estimate for my MPG. My van gets better mileage than that in reality and many cars on the roads now get 30+ MPG on the freeway even going uphill with the air conditioning on while loaded with half a dozen passengers.