After spending way too much time trying to get a $200+ electronic cruse control to work in my CRX (several times we seemed so very close, but...), I finally told my mechanic to give up (and send the unit back for a refund) and go to "plan B", so I would have some sort of "cruse control" for my long road trip to Canada (my wife and I spent over 9 days in Ontario, and just got back).
As it turned out, my "plan B" was an inexpensive fully mechanical "hand throttle" (originally designed for off-road jeeps):
http://www.redrock4x4.com/shop/products/263.html
The thing does take a little getting used to (especially going up or down a hill, where you might want to slightly adjust the throttle position to avoid going too fast or too slow). But so far (I've had the thing a little less than 2 weeks, including a large road trip to Ontario Canada) I've found the thing to be surprisingly effective and easy to use. And it's also very easy to disengage quickly if/when needed (but unlike a real "cruse control", you do have to use your hand to manually disengage it, as it doesn't automatically disengage when pressing the brake).
And the real nice thing about it, is that it is fully mechanical, so puts zero additional load on the car (i.e. unlike a real/electric cruse control, this hand throttle puts no mechanical nor electric drag on the car, as it's essentially just a 2nd throttle cable). And the thing makes it trivial for you to have slow/even throttle pressure (which is also good for FE). And since the thing locks in place, you really only have to touch it if/when you want to change your throttle position. Because once you set the throttle level you want, that setting remains until you next adjust the hand control.
NOTE: If anyone is interested, I've attached a picture of how the thing looks mounted to my CRX's stick shifter. With this mounting position, the hand throttle can be very easily controlled with my right hand, whenever my hand is resting on the stick shift. i.e. I use the same hand position I've always used to shift gears (and still use to shift gears), to also adjust the hand throttle with my thumb and fingers. IMHO this makes the motions needed to adjust this new hand control much more "natural", as they don't require you to train a new hand position into your reflexes. And it also means that putting your hand on the stick shift sets you up to easily/quickly control either the gear shift and/or the hand throttle position.
DracoFelis 
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