Streeter: The government says take a summer road trip. Marylanders’ wallets say stay home.

In their new YouTube reality show “The Great American Road Trip," U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine children drive around the country to celebrate its 250th birthday.

“We’re encouraging everyone to go take a road trip,” Duffy says in the trailer for the five-part series, which comes out in June. The secretary wants us all to “gas up the car, pack up the kids, get behind the wheel and get out and see America.”

Huh. I don’t know if you know that the Duffys met on another reality show called “Road Rules: All Stars,” but it’s cute that this is the second televised road trip they’ve taken together that they didn’t personally have to pay for.

The rest of us, on the other hand, are being called on to patriotically get our kicks on Route 66 by an administration whose war in Iran has made gas so expensive that it’s a lot to even drive Route 40. It’s blisteringly out of touch and too much to ask of us.

“We have ruled out any weekend trips this year because of the food and gas prices. We assume hotels will be just as expensive,” Susan Grayce of Germantown told me in an email. “We were going to visit a Maryland beach but now we won’t.” If not for their new grandbaby in Seattle, whom they bought tickets to go visit in July, “we would not be leaving Maryland this summer.” Over Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial kickoff of the season, AAA predicted that 5,700 fewer Marylanders would be traveling than during last year’s holiday.

Grayce isn’t the only local resident considering changing plans. Vincent Pearson, a pharmacist from Owings Mills, likes to take fun car trips between here and New Jersey, visiting arcades with his wife, Crystal. “But she told me we can’t take many of these trips anymore because gas is so expensive,” Pearson said. “We gotta think twice about hopping in the car even to see my father in Lawnside, New Jersey. If we’re gonna go see him, we might hop the train.”

Photographer Jim Conyers of Pasadena is taking a road trip to Minneapolis for a family reunion, and wants to show his son parts of the country he’s never seen on the way back. Like the Duffys, he’s into the idea of taking in the sights, which “could lead to an interesting photo essay of modern Americana.” However, he’s worried about gas and lodging costs.

“I have no idea if I can afford that long of a trip,” Conyers said.

Who can? It looks like not even the Duffys. Some worried their trip would be covered by taxpayers, but the nonprofit organization set up for the series was reportedly sponsored by several corporations, including Toyota, Boeing and Shell, which are regulated by Duffy’s department. Seems ethically sketchy. As a journalist, I can’t accept sponsorships, which is too bad because I’d consider changing my name to Leslie Gray Bob’s Citgo Streeter if it filled up my tank.

Some Marylanders are getting creative. Honor Gifford of Columbia is driving to the Covered Bridges Half-Marathon in Vermont with her father in his electric vehicle “so we don’t have to get any gas at all.” That plan was made before prices started skyrocketing, but if she were driving a car with a gas engine, it might have been dicier. “All my big travel plans have taken the gas prices into account,” she said.

I wondered if this was a phenomenon that professionals like Scott Faust, a longtime Middle River travel agent who relocated to South Carolina two years ago, were noticing. It’s been mostly “business as usual,” he told me, but some people are going big instead of cutting back because of current events.

“With the uncertainty in the world, people are going to Egypt, flying to Ireland and Iceland and all of Europe,” he said. “I’m not seeing too many people going to Ocean City. … I think they think, ‘It’s going to be high for me to fly or drive’ so they’re sucking it up and going anyway.”

Well, not everyone. Silver Spring’s Claire Dalton Pak and her husband considered going to Ireland this summer but nixed it, name-checking our favorite celebrity road tripper. “Between the Iran War and air travel under Secretary Duffy, we’re reluctant to fly right now. If we do fly somewhere, it’ll be in the U.S. Or maybe a driving trip,” she said. “I’m always up for a road trip. But with gas, not to mention tolls, it’s expensive.”

People are hurting. A lot. As an avid traveler myself, I admit that being able to take any sort of vacation has always been a privilege. “Of all the things to worry about, this is low on the list,” Pak acknowledged.

Sean Duffy is right that road trips are a fun way to experience our country, and in the uncertain world that Faust mentioned, getting out of your city or town seems like good stress relief. If only our pockets were not an added stressor. Encouraging Americans who have to choose between gas and food to hit Route 66 or whatever as some sort of patriotic obligation is blisteringly out of touch.

Unless, of course, they’d like to pay for our trips — which is unlikely, because they didn’t pay for their own.