Denise Blackerby is hitting the road again. When retail gas prices scaled historic peaks above $4 a gallon last year, she found she could no longer make monthly trips from the Dallas area to Houston in her Ford Explorer SUV to visit her family.

"When gas was $4 a gallon, I didn't go anywhere. Now it's all good," Blackerby, who is 44 and works in the information technology industry, told Reuters as she bought soft drinks at a Shell gas station in Grapevine, a town near Fort Worth...

"Last year we, in the spring time, we thought of driving back home to West Virginia from Kentucky. It's about a thousand miles, but we didn't because fuel was so expensive ... It would probably have been $800 in fuel," Debbie Smith said of the cost of filling with diesel the 75-gallon tank of their 2006 Monaco Dynasty RV with diesel.

"This year, with the fuel prices, we're hoping to get up there in June to visit family," she said in a telephone interview. "We don't have to watch where we travel, we can just go ahead."

In Little Rock, Arkansas, Kristy Evans, 41, who was recently laid off as a pharmaceutical sales representative, said she was relieved at the lower price as she filled up her Dodge SUV at $1.899 per gallon.

"It's better now because it used to cost me $60 to fill up. Now it's $38," she said...