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.

Girl on Foot...Goes to Canada

My feet, they are tired, eh. But I've discovered a new form of transportation:

Sledding!

Share a Car, Share a Cabin

So Girl on Foot grabbed her honey and got the hell out of town.

We cut out of work early on Friday, packed some grub and fled 96 miles west into the Shenandoah mountains.

Without. A. Car. (er, sort of).

After going car-free some months ago, I became a member of both Zipcar and Flexcar, two of the major national car sharing companies with brilliantly green business plans based on the idea of helping folks like me (and you) get around. Like a rental company, but 1 billion times more convenient and less corporate-feeling. It's a slightly more complicated version of Amsterdam's famous bike share scheme.

So, we checked out our car and braved sleet, snow, bumpy roads and the occasional wrong turn (I can totally reverse over the tiny bridge in the snow in the dark ... no problem) to get to our cabin. We reserved the cabin, nestled in a hollow on the edge of Shenandoah National Park, from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, of which we have recently become members. We joined up because they are an awesome group, and because you can share a bunch of so-cute-it-hurts cabins that cure you of the city faster than you can say Paul Bunyan.

So, the theme of the weekend (other than finding the outhouse, listening to mice plot their revenge on humanity in the walls, and sawing downed wood until my hands cramped) was sharing. Just like Kindergarten.

We even shared in the cabin log book, where the woman who'd stayed before us has recorded some really incredible soul-searching thoughts about her life, her dog, and the recent death of her mother. Big stuff. There was also a little too much sharing done in the log by a visiting Ice Capades troupe (I'm not making this up), and a man who went into far more detail than I would have liked about the effect of the cold on his, er, anatomy.

All in all, it was a great adventure. Good, clean fun. And while it did involve some travel by car, rest assured, it was a shared car.