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"car-free adventure"
self-designed & self-supported bicycle tour adventures
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Personal
Bicycling
Experiences
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..express is red, the orange is not, but where do they go?... | |
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About Us
car-free adventure _______________________________ |
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The central theme of our website is the development and experience of “self-designed” bicycle touring. But bicycling has made us aware of the possibilities that exist to become “car free.” But I like my car. The “About Us” webpage shares the evolutional process of considering becoming “car free.”
We have discovered ways to shop, get around our city and see the world that do not involve a car. Our alternate modes of transport provide an escape from traffic, eliminate the nuisances of parking, eradicate road rage experiences, make us more in tune with our surroundings and create opportunities for meeting interesting people.
Public transportation is cost effective and both walking and bicycling are free. We cannot always avoid the cost of transportation (airfares, for example) to get to the site of a car-free adventure, but we have found that we can reduce transportation costs before we depart and largely be car-free once at our destination.
Reducing our dependence on our car has brought us more benefits than just dollar savings. We live a healthier lifestyle that includes eating more healthfully and getting more exercise without the drudge of a daily exercise routine. And, of course, there is the pleasure of knowing that the less we drive our car, the more we reduce our consumption of oil and decrease our contribution to greenhouse gases.
We still drive our car and accept that cars are an unavoidable necessity of modern life, but we have also “taught” ourselves to try alternate methods of getting around. |
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...I look forward to riding the bus (LA) .. |
..airport customs has a sense of humor (London).. | |
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| ..looking for bargins along the route is fun (Germany).. |
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..a flea market in Chile.. |
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..getting to the subway is convient (Prague).. | |
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We began to think about becoming car free about eight years ago. I ran a spread sheet on the cost of our Ford Explorer parked in the driveway. I determined that we were paying about $500 a month for our SUV which we drove sparingly. We sold the Ford. The Ford had been our getaway car for driving to a mountain cabin we co-owned. Since we did not trust our car to climb to our cabin, we decided to rent a car to drive whenever we left the city. We have found that renting a car costs much less than $500 a month. But, even without the Ford, we still drove two cars to and from work. Not exactly car free.
I began to bicycle in 2000. My wife joined me about a year later. We began to ride longer and longer distances. My son’s favorite saying is “the training doesn’t get easier you just get faster,” and that is a fact! So as part of my training regiment I started to ride back and forth to work on my bike. My car stayed home on most works days but I still drove to shop and most of the shopping is only a half a mile away.
I drove a 1966 Porsche 356 SC convertible. I constantly got inquires about the possibility of buying the car. I enjoyed the ride and did not consider selling the car. When I retired we decided we did not need two cars. Keeping the Porsche and not the full size car was a bad idea for obvious reasons. I told my mechanic if he found someone who was interested in paying me a sum that I could not refuse I would consider it. I thought I had priced my car so I would have it forever, but he called me one day and said he had found a buyer. I let the Porsche go!
My wife continued to work part time. Being left without a car forced me to seriously think about car free transport. I had experimented with the bus and even bought a monthly pass, but I found riding my bicycle more convenient for short trips. Sometimes I waited for my wife to come home with the car and then I would shop. I just could not get into a routine of using public transit.
Walking was difficult for me to start. I drove to the grocery (half mile away), I drove to the movie (3/4 mile away) or to Home Depot (1/2 mile away). I always came up with a reason for not walking. I had a schedule problem. The movie would start before I could get there. My favorite TV show would start in 20 minutes so I had to make a quick trip. It is getting dark and I do not want to walk in the dark.
The Orange Line was completed in the fall of 2005 and brought the LA subway to within three miles of my home. We used it as an adventure but did not really use it as serious transportation. We rode on the subway to its end points and explored. We took the subway to the theater at the music center a few times.
This reluctant behavior continued until May 2006. We went to New York for our anniversary. We decided that while in New York we would use the subways, the buses or walk in Manhattan. I was aware that most New Yorkers use the transit system. But not using a cab was a leap forward for us.
We took the subway to and from the airport and on long runs to places we wanted to visit. We walked 1 to 2 miles to museums or plays. We found that we were not alone and the time spent walking went by quickly. It was fun. It started raining on one outing and we ducked under a building overhang with other New Yorker’s until the rain subsided. We returned from New York determined to walk! We had used public transit. We bicycled. It was time to walk the half mile to the grocery store. Oops! My TV show is about to start, maybe tomorrow.
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I have two memories of riding on a bus from my childhood. The first was taking the bus from Shepherdsville, Kentucky where I grew up, to Louisville. Shepherdsville was only about 25 miles from Louisville so it was a quick trip. Louisville was and is the largest city in Kentucky and the object of these trips was shopping. Shopping malls had not been invented yet and Fourth Street was the street with all of the activity as I remember.
The second memory I have of being on the bus was during summer vacation from school when my parents sent my brother and I to visit my father’s grandparents. They lived on a farm just outside Scottsville, Kentucky. I remember it was a Greyhound bus. These trips took several hours and I recall being bored. I do remember we would stop at a restaurant in a small town about halfway through the trip for lunch. That I can remember because we got to order whatever we wanted.
As a teenager I moved to Louisville and I went to Junior High School there. I rode the city bus to and from my junior High School. Getting on the bus on the way to school was easy. I stood at the bus stop with a friend and caught the first bus. On the way back was a different story. It was always a free-for-all getting on the bus at the school to return home. There must have been 50 kids waiting for each bus and you had to stand your ground or wait for the next bus. There was no adult authority around so it was every kid for him or herself.
My next bus experience which I remember was taking a greyhound bus from Shepherdsville, Kentucky to Trinidad, Colorado. I was 18 years old and attending Trinidad State Junior College. I had gone home for the thanksgiving holiday and returned by Greyhound to Colorado. I remember that trip being very long. On a couple of legs of the trip there was just myself and the driver onboard. I spent a lot of time asleep on the back seat of the bus.
As an adult I rode the bus for several months during the gas crisis in the seventies. Gas prices had tripled and the lines at the gas stations were hideously long. I only worked 10 miles from my house which in LA is a short distance. I was a runner then and had not gotten into distance bicycling. Running ten miles in the morning and ten at night seemed a little much so I took the bus. It involved a transfer but I would rather wait at a bus stop than in a line for hours waiting for a chance to buy gas. The web had not been invented yet and thus no email. Memos were used instead. I found the bus to be the perfect place to read all of the memos that I got each day and generate a response ready to be typed by the secretary.
In the modern era I rode the bus in Berlin once in 2006 to get from one museum to a second before it closed. The light rail system in Berlin is great so I used that for most of my travels around the city. But that once light rail did not make sense. In fact it would have been impossible to use light rail.
Accept for tour buses and the Berlin experience I had not been on a bus until recently. With gas prices climbing I am beginning to change. I actually bought a monthly bus pass but I did not use the bus regularly and lost money on the deal. I have not bought another monthly pass to date but I am using the bus more.
Since I have access to the subway I do not use the bus as often. But, I have begun to explore and ride the bus more as a curiosity than as transportation. My exploration has provided me with the knowledge to become a serious bus rider. We own only one car now which my wife will drive to the University in the fall. Then I may be forced to become a serious bus person. I cannot bike everywhere!
In the past, my subway riding was much like my Club Med experience. At Club Med I’d participate in the after dinner sing-along and other foolish activities that I would never think of doing at home. Using the subway was something I did on vacation and it was limited to travel in the Eastern United States and Europe. In the United States my subway travel was driven by need and adventure, in Europe, where public transportation is well-developed, I relied on the subways and trains to get about cities and to view the sites.
Our first European exposure to subways and trains occurred when I was sent to Germany on business. My wife accompanied me and we decided to vacation for a couple of weeks in Western Europe after my work commitment was completed. We needed to be frugal and used the book “Europe on $ 15 a Day” as a guide. No, that’s not a typo, it was $15! Needless to say, the subway fit our budget and we used the Paris Metro extensively to get to the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and other sites on our ‘must see’ list. We were naďve, novice riders. During one comical experience we climbed over the turnstile to get to the subway platform, because we could not figure out how to feed our ticket into the machine at the turnstile. The Parisians were taken aback and we probably added to the lore of the “ugly Americans.”
A few years later, another work assignment took us to Washington, D.C. for several months. My family accompanied me to D.C., where I had the use of a company car, which we used for most of our outings, but we did use the subway on occasion. Mostly, these subway trips were used to provide our children a new experience, not for serious travel. I suppose it doesn’t qualify as “real” subway travel, but we rode the subway that connects the Capitol Building with the Dirkson Senate Office Building in hopes of meeting a Senator and we did. We found eating in the Senate Cafeteria economical and an excursion to the Senate afterwards to listen to Senate speeches was both fun and interesting.
While living in D.C. we forayed to New York City (NYC) by train. Once there, we used the subway to navigate the city. I had reservations about using the subway in New York, because many of the movies I had seen that featured the city had shady characters using it for transportation and all manner of mayhem on the subway was depicted. After observing the traffic in Manhattan and after a couple of bus rides that took longer to get to our destination than a brisk walk, I realized the subway was the best choice to get around the city and I set aside what I’d seen in the movies. We used the subway and had no problems. Like us, everyone was just trying to get from point A to Point B beneath the congestion of the streets. On this trip I also found that the reputation of New Yorkers as rude and uncaring was false. When I asked people on the street for directions people went out of their way to help. I have had the same experience during every trip I have taken to NYC, since that first adventure. Maybe I have become hardened by living in Los Angeles for forty years, but I give the New Yorker’s a thumb’s up!
More recently, I have used the Bay Area Rapid Trans system (BART) in San Francisco. When the BART was being built, there were fears that there would be limited rider ship, but those fears have proved to be unfounded. Many San Franciscans and East Bay dwellers, seemingly, rely on the Bart and the bus as their primary means of transportation. I have used the BART to avoid renting a car to get to a hotel in Oakland prior to catching a flight to Paris from the airport. I’ve used the BART to get to my son’s house in San Francisco when he could not pick me up at the airport, and I’ve used the subway to get to and from the airport for a Raider’s football game in Oakland. My BART experiences were not motivated by a desire to use public transit, but rather out of an aversion to the hassles of renting and returning a car to the airport.
Most recently, my wife and I have traveled through Heathrow on our way to cycling trips in Europe. On our first trip, we scheduled a few days to stopover in London. I paid $100 for a taxi from Heathrow to the hotel and another $100 for the return to the airport. This was about the same amount paid for two theater tickets to two plays. I’d would much rather spend my money on entertainment than on taxi rides. When I got back to Los Angeles I investigated other methods of getting from Heathrow to a hotel and discovered that we could catch the London underground, or the tube, as Londoners call it, at the airport. The tube cost $3 per person per trip! The next trip to Europe with a layover in London, we used the subway. It was painless, even with the luggage, and it was certainly economical.
In October, 2005, access to the Los Angeles subway, the Metro, came to the West San Fernando Valley where I live. A transit center was built about three miles from our home and I decided it was time to get serious about using the subway and other public transportation for getting around the city.
My train travel began as a kid when I traveled to my grandmother’s house during the summer on a train. The train was pulled by a coal burning engine which would huff and puff into the station with smoke and steam blowing everywhere. I would stand as close to the tracks as I dared until the train was about 50 yards down the tracks and then move to a safer spot to observe its final approach. The train ride was from Shepherdsville, Kentucky to Bowling Green, Kentucky about three fourths of the way through the state. It was quite an adventure. The trip took most of the day or so it seemed. I made the trip several times as a youngster.
My summer trips to Grandma’s was my introduction to train travel and ended before my teens. Train travel has not been considered seriously by me since as a method of travel and has remained as an occasional adventure. As an adult my wife and I used the Eurial Pass to travel in Europe when we were much younger. It was our first experience with train travel in Europe. We traveled by train in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France. We did not have an agenda. We would arrive in a city or town, locate a hotel and stay the night. Or, if we saw a town that looked interesting from the train we would get off, dump our luggage at the station and explore. After taking in the local lore we would return to the station and take the train to our next destination. We took spontaneous day tours in Switzerland along the lakes and along the Rhine in Germany. The Eurail Pass included passage on the lakes in Switzerland which were fun as well.
More recently I have ridden the “ski train” in Denver. The ski train runs from the Main Station in downtown Denver to the Winter Park ski area. My daughter lives in downtown Denver which is only a short distance from the station. The train is very comfortable. Good coffee is available and can be coupled with a tasty breakfast prepared onboard. The train travels through beautiful Rocky Mountain views all the way to the ski area. When the train reaches the Winter Park ski area it stops at the main lodge to unload the skiers and their equipment. After collecting my skis it is a very short walk to the ski lift. I am ready to ski because I purchased my lift tickets on the train. My after ski clothes, newspapers, etc. are left on the train while I ski.
The train departs for Denver at 4 PM. On the way back to Denver I can relax, purchase some wine, talk about the days skiing or read the newspaper. The train provides snacks to accompany the wine if desired. The Station in Denver is located in an area with many excellent places to eat or just hang out within easy walking distance. But typically my Daughter picks me and my skis up at the station.
It is a fun trip but not totally car free!
"car free adventure"