Car Free Year in Review

Okay. I know it's been months since the last update, but let's just forget all that, say I was too busy busing it to blog, and celebrate the fact that my car-free year has come and gone, and I am still sans car. A little recap of the highs and lows of saying goodbye to Cecelia and taking to the streets by foot:

Highs

• Emissions. What emissions?
• 15 novels, 30 magazines and 12 gazillion daily newspapers.
• 4 fiction stories written, revised, written again.
• Daily exposure to humans who don't all look, act, talk, smell the same as me.
• Zipcaring to the Shenandoah cabin and beach camping.
• My first trip on a Chinatown bus to NYC.
• Bicycle love.

Lows

• Scary mean bus driver. She yelled. I trembled, got mad, composed letter in my head recommending she take up a new line of work.
• Missing every single happy hour that ends before 8 p.m.
• Missing my car. I still sometimes miss my car. So sad, so true.
• Carsick woman vomiting on my shoe on the bus.
• Getting carsick on the bus and wanting to vomit on the shoe of the woman next to me.
  

Bicycle, Bicycle, Beer!

Two items on the bicycle commuting front:

The Europeans are at it again with their smarty-pants ideas about getting around car-free. On Sunday, Paris launched a huge new bike-sharing scheme, putting 10,600 bikes into circulation around the city. Now Parisians and tourists can Le Tour around the famous city car-free.

Way to go, Paris.

Second on the list: Beer and Bikes.

My favorite hometown brewery, New Belgium Brewery (makers of the famous Fat Tire), have a wicked fun new website (http://www.folllowyourfolly.com/).

Who said that dioramas were passe? Not me.

Well, New Belgium is looking for a few good riders to take up the very same mission that yours truly embarked on last year. Give up your car for a year. Get a new bike.

In exchange, New Belgium might give you a shiny New Belgium original bike. If they don't, drink their beer anyway. It's tasty. (If you can get it, that is. I can't. They don't distribute here. Sigh. Stupid quality control and microbrewery local principles. I will just have to satisfy myself with Dogfish Head until a trip home.)

So anyway, if you live in any of the following cities, then go here to put your hat in the ring:

Denver
Truckee
Seattle
Portland, OR
Boise
Missoula
Durango
Ft. Collins
Flagstaff
Tempe
Austin

Additional Resources:

• Funny good book on beer and social change: Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World

Strategies for the Car Free Summer Vacation

Sure, sometimes I long for the wide open roads of the West and an old-fashioned, stop and eat foot-tall banana cream pie in every diner between here and Tallahassee, road trip.

But as summer dawns, and my feet get to itching (oh how they itch!), I've managed to get out of town a couple of times already without owning a car. It can be done, and truth-be-told, these little getaways were far easier than I might have expected. Local getaways tend to be less expensive and come with a lighter footprint than the carbon-heavy globetrotting.

I can't help but lust after Lonely Planet guidebooks for far-flung locals, but from here on out, I may take a note from my parents and find an alternative way to go. (Girl on Foot's parents spent nearly six months traveling by bicycle in the western United States and Canada last year. They literally rode away from their house, headed north, and didn't look back. It's how they tend to take most of their vacations ... making the planet healthier and riding laps around me)

Okay, back to strategies for small summer escapes:

Ride Your Bike Anywhere

In the great tradition of Girl on Foot's parents, roll on out of town.

Unzip Beach Camping

We zipped our way to camp at Assateague and hauled along bikes for getting around once we were there. Car-sharing at its best. (I swear, Zipcar doesn't pay me. It just makes sense.)

Ticket to Ride

In order to meet up with my honey and her mom at a bed and breakfast in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, I checked into train schedules. Sure enough. I can get there via Amtrak or the local commuter train. The places trains and buses go blow my mind. And for car-free folks, they are your ticket out of town.

Carpool to Shenandoah National Park

I teamed up with some generous friends to carpool to the mountains for a little volunteer work and hiking. We weeded some invasive species, took a four-mile hike, and got poison ivy. Good times.

The Green Turtle Adventure Bus with Hippie Roots

I have never ridden the tortoise buses, but I mention it because it's so funny and original and I want to do it.

http://www.greentortoise.com/

Other Resources:

• Train: http://www.amtrak.com/
  
• Bus: http://www.greyhound.com/
  
• Chinatown Buses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines
  
• Bike Trails: http://www.traillink.com/

Smells Like...

An upside (98% of the time) of commuting by foot is that I'm far more sensitive to the details. No more so when I'm sitting next to a man who has been living on the streets or when I'm walking the last half a mile to the office under a canopy of trees.

Now, when I walk, bike, bus and carpool, it's like exploring a whole new (olfactory) map of the world.

A few of the smells that frequently populate my house-to-office trek include:

• Car and bus exhaust
• Urine (my least favorite, and the most humbling)
• Coffee
• Sun-warmed pine needles (my most favorite)
• Pizza
• Body odor (ranging everywhere from sweat-soaked spicy to downright funky)
• Just-cut grass

France Has Best (Bike) Idea Ever

In my attempt to learn more about other forms of transportation and resource sharing, I ran across this 2006 Wired article detailing a new approach to the old idea (at least in Amsterdam) of public bikes for use in urban areas:

The rent-a-bike scheme, called Vélo'v Grand Lyon, is open to anyone armed with a credit card. It costs 1 euro ($1.20) an hour, but there is no charge for the first 30 minutes. Since 90 percent of trips take less than half an hour, most subscribers pay nothing.

The model resembles that of the fast-expanding car-sharing business on this side of the pond. Which makes sense since, for better or worse (worse, I say) Europeans love bicycles and we Americans love cars.

The bikes have lots of technological bells and whistles (thus, the Wired plug) to keep them from being stolen and to keep Lyonites peddling. Pretty smart marriage of human-powered get-around and edgy technology.

Are you listening Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver ... and all you other big smoggy ol' cities?

Do this. Someone do this. Please.