I know a few months ago I mentioned trying to have a green road trip… well, this weekend I headed down to Williamsburg, VA with some members of H*yas for Choice to attend a Planned Parenthood Student Organizing conference.  The conference was amazing and inspiring (I wrote about it over on my other blog) but I did spend the weekend using plastic (and a few other resources) like it was going out of style.

At home we’ve switched to these stainless steel straws and somehow that made me feel like seriously tuff environmental stuff.  Washing my straws?  Hell-oh hippy town.  However, this weekend there was nary a stainless steel straw in sight.

We rented an SUV (!) to drive the crew down, there were 5 of us and some concern about squeezing into my Civic.  I did, however, kind of want to say “suck it up.”  The SUV got horrible gas mileage, I spent like $120 on gas in two days/300 miles (I mean, I’ll be reimbursed but seriously?  That is a lot of money for gas).  No wonder Americans are complaining about money and gas prices.  That is an absurd amount… of course, if you bought an SUV then you can’t really claim to be surprised.

Plus, we ate fast-food most of the weekend, used plastic cups in our hotel room, and then drank a soda out of a bottle.  I found it weird, actually, that William & Mary didn’t have many water fountains around to re-fill my water bottle.  Maybe everyone there actually drinks bottled water?  Plus, I have this weird thing about drinking bathroom water.

Anyway, I felt seriously bad about my eco footprint this weekend.  I’ve been slipping in general lately– with the school year starting its been getting harder to find time to do things like grocery shop (so I’ve been buying lots of lunches), and my schedule is really weird this year (so I’ve been driving a lot).  This weekend seriously re-lit the fire under me though.