Thursday, July 27, 2006

T-Shirt #3

ND in Lancaster, PA -

What's it like to live without a car? We put that question to our two kids (ages 11 and 15) four years ago and they were not going for it. So we decided to start out slowly - if we could go for a whole month without using the car in town, we'd go out for a nice dinner as a family. After a few months of that, we realized that the car was not truly necessary. But it still took some convincing that selling the car made sense. What if someone got sick?

So, what was the "plus" that put us over the edge? There were actually many. For me, it was the idea of putting a vegetable garden in my back yard. In our case, that meant hiring someone to do lots of excavating and building planter boxes. So my plus was having a vegetable garden out my back door.

But we discovered other pluses. Believe it or not, one of them turned out to be more family time. When you can't run your children all over town for various activities, schedules change. We chose to keep free time in our schedule, to be at home together or do other activities together. Also, if the weather does not cooperate, you tend to stay at home rather than go somewhere - who wants to bike in a driving rain storm?

Getting in better shape is definitely a plus. So is getting other people to question their car use. Seeing us bike or hearing about it does tend to help others to think about how much they use their car for short trips or multiple trips in a day.

And, with the price of gas these days, we're saving big time by not having to fill up at the pump!

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