Our Fourth Anniversary of being Car Free!! »
By Steve on Jun 5, 2008 in Living Car Free, Your CarFree Success Stories | 1 Comment
Paul Cooley of Sante Fe New Mexico, writes in his blog about how his family transitioned to a Car Free family. This past May they celebrated their 4th year of being Car Free!! Congratulations Paul!! Hear about it in his owns words:
“It’s our fourth carfree anniversary today. I had hoped to write a long essay touching on what we’ve learned in the last four years, but my honeybees are keeping me very busy right now. A few quick comments is all I can manage, then I have to bike off to the hardware store for some more 1 by 10′s to build more beehives.
We did not get rid of the car primarily to save money. However — gas was $1.65 a gallon when we watched our ’98 Saab pull out of the driveway, which is now a garden, for the last time. During the past four years, we have rented cars twice, most recently to drive to our canoe trip down the Mississippi. Each time, we have been very happy to hand the car back over to the rental agency. I’ve always had the feeling, when I filled up a tank of gas, that I might as well take a handful of cash and put a match to it. I guess I never felt that the service rendered — being propelled along the road without doing anything — equaled the cash required.
It is difficult to categorize many of the changes in our life as either positive or negative. Naturally, I would say I have a high degree of inertia. We did not become the type of family that goes out and bikes great distances every week. We live, generally, very locally. I’m quite happy about that. The coffee shop and restaurant in the shopping center down the street are very good, and they’re right there. There’s regular grocery stores in our neighborhood, one natural food store about ten minutes away by bike, and across the street from that store is Home Depot. It is perhaps a BIG negative that I will patronize a place like Home Depot, that is easy to get to, and relative easy to park my bike at — though they did take away the bike rack, they were required by local law to have — than to the local hardware store Empire Builder, that is a little harder to get to and requires locking up to a chain link fence across the street. I believe in shopping locally. With a little more effort, I could do more of my shopping locally, but I am in the grips of carfree inertia. We even have to force ourselves into the habit of going to the Farmer’s Market. At the end of the summer, the Farmer’s Market gets its permanent home in the redeveloped railyard. In the meantime, it’s been shuffled around. I’m almost like a honeybee; when it gets moved, I act like I have no idea how to find it. Of course, most of those things have more to do with my personality and habits of living than with being carfree. Read the rest
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