I've been reading your posts about your travels, simultaneously with the explosion in gas prices, and wondered if it was going to crimp your style. That'd be a shame, because what you've written about the cozy setup of your minivan sounds idyllic, kind of a kid's treehouse with wheels. Takes me back...which I suppose is what they mean about having a second childhood when you retire. Sounds better every day!

I agree with you about the economics when you look deeper than just raw mileage. There are more ways to keep your carbon footprint and oil consumption down than paying a small fortune to get a brand-new hybrid, and telecommuting is very high on the list. You can bet a lot more people will be working from home in the future. What I think has been holding it back has been, ironically, free-enterprise (oh, Tom's gonna get me for this!). But despite ideology, it's a fact that countries whose telecommunications infrastructure is operated by the government or by national telecoms enjoy Internet bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than the US average, and the key to telecommuting is a high-quality communications network. That's why India's sucking away the jobs, and it would be one way to help keep the jobs here.

Not that I'm drifting off-topic...my personal variation on your set up would be to add high-speed Net service, satellite in remote locations, tapping into wi-fi in the city, so that I could roam while continuing to support myself and keep in touch. That's my little nirvana.