Special Series
The Year of Living Car-lessly Experiment
In a Series
Car-less Vacation, Five Lessons
Our car-less family vacation in Vancouver, BC, was a big success. Here’s a full report, for those of you who shared your own car-less vacation stories and are interested in such things. For the rest of you, you might want to skim the travelogue to find the five lessons I draw.
The only nail-biter (if you can call it that) was the very first leg of the trip, which resembled the old brain teaser about the fox, the goose, and the bag of beans.
We had two parents, two kids (our eldest is currently in Alaska), and four bikes to get to the train station by 6:45 a.m. A bus connects our neighborhood to the train station, and King County Metro buses all have bike racks. Unfortunately, they carry only two bikes each. Furthermoe, there’s no way of knowing in advance whether any given bus will have one space, two spaces, or no spaces free on its rack. Because the kids needed help getting their bikes (loaded with panniers) both on and off the racks and because they didn’t know where to get off the bus, they needed either to be accompanied by a parent or to have one parent at each end of the route to assist.
We left the house before 6:00. The first bus that arrived already had one bike loaded. We let it pass. Fortunately, the next two buses that arrived had no bikes aboard yet, so we all arrived at the train station without having to send kids on buses unaccompanied.
OK, this story wasn’t very interesting. Why bother to tell it?
