gone gone gone, free free free!

I wanted to take a pic of my empty driveway, or of my sweet blue car driving off into the sunset, but I don't think I'll ever get around to it and I want to celebrate now!

The car is gone! I actually did it! Sold the thing to a nice woman, paid off my loan, and upped the cashflow to my savings.

It seemed to take forever to get the car ready to sell--a couple months from deciding to sell it. But I posted on craigslist on a Thursday, sold it to the first caller on Saturday, and the buyer came to pick it up last week. She drove me down to the bike shop where I'd had my bike tuned, then she took off down the road and I biked home to that empty driveway.

I can't believe I really did it. I couldn't have even imagined this half a year ago. Wish me luck!

I love, uh, hate, no really, I love the bus!

It seems particularly disingenuous to have glossed over my bus trip to Seattle, given that I make that trip twice a month. So here’s the redux.

Home to Seattle ferry dock took 3-1/2 hours, instead of the 2 hours it takes in a car. For that reason, I didn’t make the round trip in one day--had I done that, I would’ve started at 8:45 am from home and been on or waiting for some form of transit, less my one-hour appt in Seattle, all the way till 7:30 pm. No thank you!

So I ended up staying with friends Mon-Thurs because I had a Mon and a Wed night gig--and I packed the other evenings with socializing too. Walking downtown one evening took 40 minutes and I ducked into Uwajimaya on the way. What can be bad about having Uwajimaya en route and accessible because you’re on foot?!

Overall, being sans car in Seattle, away from PT, I experienced two things exactly opposite of what I’d expected: The first I mentioned in my last post--being dependent on someone else for my transport was actually relaxing and did not make me feel pressed for time at all. Whew.

Second, my car has always functioned as a home base when I’m in Seattle, a place where I can shut everything out and get my head together in between meetings. I thought I’d feel exposed without the car, not quite together, at loose ends.

I’m pleased to report this was entirely not so! I don’t know why this was true. Maybe because I love being under my own power (on foot or bike) and so was more relaxed overall. Maybe because I wasn’t frantic about getting to and fro and so didn’t need down time in my car cocoon. Whatever the reason, I’ll take the result.

Now, don’t let me gloss over the down side: I have a memory bank full of times that I’ve hated the bus--think sardine-packed overheated wet commuters in winter, the inescapable “I’m on the bus, where are you?” chatter of the mobile phone booth.

And I was carrying WAY too much stuff, mostly in the form of books--books I took for the work I did while I was in Seattle, books I bought (ahem, Elliott Bay is also more accessible on foot), and books I picked up on hold from the library. Add my computer, water, clothes, blah blah blah, and I could’ve been backpacking! Well, I guess I was. Can I count that as one of this month’s two hikes??

Because now that I know I can get to Seattle without a car and actually enjoy (most of) the trip, I’ll have to report on how my hiking rule has been (or not been) satisfied--I’m supposed to hike two times this month and I’ve hiked exactly zero.

Getting to trailheads remains a conundrum, though that may owe more to having done three book projects in the last two weeks than to my enforced car boycott. I still have a week, dammit--I’m not out of the game yet!

What blog???

OK, so I've discovered in this little car-free experiment that...I'm not a blogger! Who has time for up to the minute rehashing of a day gone by?

Actually, this is related to what I've discovered this month sans auto: I like to be slow, I like to do nothing, the fast lane is too fast for me.

To wit: I was worried that without a car I'd be rushing around all the time because it would take so much time to get places by bus or bike. One trip to Seattle by bus squashed that misconception. You don't **rush** anywhere on the bus. You go where the bus wants, when it wants, no decisions required! And I love that. Who knew that giving up my car would free up space in my brain?

Yes, I have decided to give up my car--even before my month is up. Just the money it eats makes it untenable to keep the thing. Remember: I work more than a month a year to pay for it, and I could definitely do something else with that month! (Or with that money.) Anyone wanna buy a 2003 Matrix with low miles (and good mileage)?

As for blogging, well, maybe the new brain real estate coming my way will generate more consistent musings...if not, you can just picture me blissed out at the beach staring into the far horizon.

Does this count?

So, yesterday a friend’s car broke down and she asked to borrow mine. Sure, right? I mean, there’s still one less car on the road, and I’m not driving. Except that I am, or I did--I delivered the car to her. Some purity gene in my DNA threw up a red flag--I thought you said you weren’t driving your car for a month and here you just did! (And I loved it, I have to say--more on that unnerving reality some other time.)

I decided to call phooey on consistency (and as a copyeditor no less!), with this reasoning: part of this car-free experiment is about exploring ways to share a resource, of not being sole owner or user of that plastic and who-knows-what hunk of machinery in my driveway that sucks cash like water. Share the resource, share the cost, cut down on quantity of said monsters overall--and in this case that means sharing my unused car with someone who needs it. Duh.

Pain in the @$#!

Tired, cranky, irritated in general, yesterday I would have driven. The day wasn't that rainy--hardly at all, really. I had no immediate deadlines that put me in a time crunch. The groceries I wanted and picked up all fit easily in my backpack, along with two client packages from my mailbox.

So what was the problem? What is the problem? Because I'm still cranky when I think about dealing with next week's Seattle errands without a car...though it's not only the logistics of next week's errands that're getting to me.

More that things I use my car for keep popping into my head: How will I get to my eye doctor I've seen since I was 11 yrs old? How will I get to Finnriver Farm to pick blueberries in August? Yeah, I can get a ride, but can I find someone who likes to go as early as I do? Grumble grumble crank.

Realistically, there are cars I can borrow for some trips, and walking, busing, and biking will handle the bulk of what I need quite well--and I'm worrying about things that haven't happened yet. I expect it'll just take some planning until I get into a carless rhythm. But rationality has nothing to do with this mood.

So long Pollyanna, hello Eeyore--I've always wanted to be an old, depressed, stuffed donkey--! I hope this passes soon.

Inspiration

Another word on what prompted me to try this car-free thing: inspiration from seemingly unrelated quarters, literally.

I live in a relatively small space (450sf), which is a ballroom compared to my former 135sf hut, and I'm still in love with the economy of space. So in ogling the tiny homes at Tumbleweed (like the one pictured), I recognized a principle applied to living spaces that I could adapt to other areas of my life--in fact, these same principles underlie my passion for editing and use of language.

Somewhere on that tiny-house site, the builder writes, "Revelation is a subtractive process," which is exactly true of editing. And some synapse connected instantly: in looking around for how to save $$ so that I can buy land or a house, I suddenly saw how removing something (the car) would add what I need ($$, duh!; not to mention some intangibles that I'm curious about).

As a bonus, this experiment promises to invigorate ideas about my future housing needs (where, what, how)--exciting and fun stuff all around.

Car-free test month

Welcome to Day 2 of my car-free challenge--my month-long test to see what my life looks like without owning a car.

Why? Some recent back of the envelope calculations revealed that I'd save $6500/yr (!!!) if I didn't own a car (a lot of that from car payments). Reduce that by bus/ferry costs, bike maintenance, and car rental (say, for two two-week road trips, who doesn't love a road trip?), and net savings are still $4900. Holy petrochemicals batman! I'm as eco-hip as the town I live in (nauseatingly so sometimes), but the potential savings blew my mind.

I could use that $$ to save for a house down payment, to accelerate getting out of cc debt (yep, I've made some questionable choices in the past), to travel, to donate to charities--or to not work for more than a month...!!! Eye opening, to say the least. And I consider myself a frugal chick as it is, but I've apparently been blind to (or simply accepting of) this giant cash suck for some time.

And I love having a car, or rather, what having a car facilitates. It gets me easily to Seattle for city culture, friends, and business (I hopped in the car one day, last minute, to hear Eduardo Galeano at the downtown Seattle library, and he was pure magic). It gets me to trailheads spur of the moment (wake up to a nice day? time for an all-day solo hike in the Olympics). And it gets me all the convenience of errand running, laundry doing, etc. that's familiar to every car owner.

The question: Can I do the things I love (out of town friends/culture, hiking) and live where I love (PT), all without owning a car? I already work at home, and I'm single/no kids, able to bike, so I don't have a lot of hindrances. I'm really curious what this'll look like.

So, here are my rules for the month: I have to keep all of my Seattle trips that're already on my calendar (though I already see how I'd arrange things differently if I didn't have a car), I have to do laundry (no fair piling it up till July...), and I have to go hiking twice. I also have to keep up with a full work schedule, approx 50 hours/week because of several book deadlines. And most important: I have to like it!

Seems simple, right? And, at this point, I'm going to ignore that I unconsciously garaged my bike last year...as soon as the rains and dark came on.

We shall see...