By Amy Moore

The News staff writer

As people pack their vehicles full of vacation items, one item they are hesitant to get plenty of is gasoline. With Texans paying record-high average retail gasoline prices this week, travelers are shying away from Memorial Day weekend vacations and focusing on ways to deal with rising gas prices.

“We can’t afford to go on vacation,” Linda Thibodeaux of Nederland said. “It’s too expensive to be driving around a lot.”

Filing up her truck with her husband Ron, Linda said she expects the rising price of gas to get worse and blames President Bush and the U.S. government for the increase.

“If everyone in the country would go one day without buying gas, we could really hurt the companies and they would have to do something,” Linda said.

According to a weekly AAA Texas gasoline price survey released Friday, the average price of regular-grade gasoline rose 13 cents to $3.08 per gallon, exceeding the record set in early September 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Rita. The national average rose 11 cents to a record $3.23 per gallon.

Cheryl Doyle has made changes to her lifestyle after the cost of gas kept getting higher. The Groves resident said she traded in her GMC Yukon for a more fuel efficient Honda CR-V, but she still holds back when it comes to road trips.

“I’m going to the beach for Memorial Day for the first time in over a year,” she said. “Gas is just too high.”

The most expensive gasoline in any of the 11 Texas cities surveyed was found in Amarillo and El Paso where regular-grade averaged $3.28 per gallon, a 7-cent increase in Amarillo and an 11-cent rise in El Paso. The cheapest gas was found in San Antonio, where it averaged $2.99 per gallon, 13 cents more than last week.

“Pump prices set new record highs just about everyday this week," said AAA Texas spokeswoman Rose Rougeau. "Refiners are stressed, supplies are tight, and demand continues as AAA projects travel this holiday to be about the same as last year when fuel prices were nearly 30 cents a gallon lower."

With prices only climbing, many motorists simply cannot cut back on driving.

“We can’t not drive,” Linda Thibodeaux said. “There’s no other way for us to get around, we just have to deal with it.”

Always looking for ways to save a few dollars, motorists can fight skyrocketing gas prices by taking control of their vehicle’s unnecessary fuel consumption.

Performing simple and inexpensive vehicle maintenance will not only save gas money, perhaps as much as $1,200 per year, but will also improve a vehicle’s safety and dependability.

The Car Care Council offers these gas-savings maintenance and driving tips:

• Check your vehicle gas cap. About 17 percent of the vehicles on the roads have gas caps that are either damaged, loose or are missing altogether, causing 147 million gallons of gas to vaporize every year.

• When tires aren’t inflated properly, it’s like driving with the parking brake on, and can cost a mile or two per gallon.

• A vehicle can have either four, six or eight spark plugs, which fire as many as three million times each 1,000 miles, resulting in a lot of heat, electrical and chemical erosion. A dirty spark plug causes misfiring, which wastes fuel. Spark plugs need to be replaced regularly.

• An air filter that is clogged with dirt, dust and bugs chokes off the air and creates a “rich” mixture – too much gas being burned for the amount of air, which wastes gas and causes the engine to lose power. Replacing a clogged air filter can improve gas mileage by as much as 10 percent.

• Keep your car properly tuned. A tune-up can improve your gas mileage by an average of four percent. Fixing a serious maintenance problem, such as a faulty oxygen sensor, can improve your mileage by as much as 40 percent.

These simple vehicle maintenance steps can add up to serious savings. To learn more about how to maintain your vehicle and reduce your fuel expenses, visit www.carcare.org.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.