One of the things you discover as you settle into a carfree life is that the pace changes. You know your commute time will be different on a bike or bus than with a car and so you learn to plan accordingly. This summer my son has been playing soccer about 6 miles from home. I picked the Foster Park location because it is an easy one-bus ride from our house. It is also on the greenway, but I didn't think in March we would be regularly bike-commuting. Never underestimate Pete. I should know that by now. We only took the bus the first day. Since then we've been biking to soccer twice a week. We will be going there later today.
This weekend we were the drivers of a Mazda 2 hatchboack, through our renting from Enterprise. I have to say I was really impressed with how much room it had for as small as it was. Mike and Pete picked me up from work on Friday and for the next two days we had a car-paced schedule. I had 10 bags worth of newspapers for the PaperGator. We picked up two pieces of wallboard at Lowes, went to the farmers market and picked up a pizza. In the space of 2 hours. You don't do that on a bike. After dinner we packed up the car with our camping gear and on Saturday morning headed out for Pokagon State Park, about 50 miles north of Fort Wayne. The day was humid (we are in the Midwest and it is officially summer, of course it was humid!) but generally pleasant. We set up our tent, hiked, went to a naturalist program (Scatology anyone?) went to the beach, soaked up the sand and water and sun, made dinner and when the sun went down, so did we. Sunday morning we had breakfast and packed up the tent and meandered our way home through some of Northern Indiana's really beautiful lake country and did a quick clean out of the car, picked up Mike's mom and headed out to northwest Indiana for a niece's graduation party. We came home that evening and had dinner. It was a very full weekend. I felt like I'd been away on vacation with all of the traveling! But I also realized I've gotten used to a different pace of life as my "normal" and I don't miss trying to pack in every last activity possible.
As a family we've gotten more deliberate about choosing what we want to do. That isn't necessarily distance or transportation related either. It's just about slowing down and having an opportunity to savor the things we ARE doing. It's not how I've lived much of my adult life and probably even less of my parenting life. I really enjoyed the things we were able to do this weekend because we had the right tool available to do them - in this case, an automobile. But I also don't find myself feeling like I need that tool permanently in my toolbox to live a life I fully enjoy.
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