Coming off the high

The car-free month is over and has been over for a few days, but we have yet to take our car out. We haven't needed it. CFD has been continuing to take the bike to go grocery shopping and we haven't needed to go anywhere else so far.

I'm sure CFD would love to be permanently car-free, but I think he's going to have to work up his leg muscles, physical endurance and find better bike routes first. Today, our first weekend off the challenge, we have some place to go and it's 20 miles away. I don't doubt that he can make it one way, but we have to come back too. Public transportation does not lend itself well to where we're going and the Dutch bike is too large to be allowed on buses or trains, so mixing the two isn't much of an option. So, for today, we're going to have to take our car. I'll make CFD take comfort in knowing that he would be transporting three adults and two children in our sedan, so we'll be making full use of our vehicle.

I do think that we will be driving less over the course of the next year. CFD likes biking. He prefers it to driving, not only for the environmental factor, but because he likes moving. I need a new bike to do any more biking. We discovered during this challenge that my bike is probably beyond repair. Perhaps in the spring, we'll get me a new bike. Until then, I'm content to use more public transportation.

We did it!

We celebrated the completion of our car-free challenge today, by going out for drinks. Transported by our Dutch bike, of course. I hopped in the cargo bucket with the rain cover on and I felt like a little kid again, squeezing into a small space, rolled up in a ball. My husband got a good laugh out of it, as did I.

Well, I applaud my husband for his efforts with this car-free challenge. Now that we've successfully completed our month, we'll have eleven more months of stories to tell.

Less than a week left!

Our car-free challenge is coming to a close and we are still going strong. We've taken the kids to school, gone shopping, gone to church, gone out to dinner, gone to the doctor's office, and gone on dates, all the things we would have probably done in our car, in our Dutch bike instead. Since my husband is exhibiting signs of being a rotten blogger, I will blog on his behalf and tell you that as the primary and only operator of this Dutch bike in our family, he really loves this bike. He is thrilled that he has had this opportunity to ride around in this bike and he looks forward to eleven more months of it. If I know him as well as I think I do, he'll be trying to talk me into purchasing one of these things for our family over the course of the next year. He's hooked.

I think Christmas came early for my husband this year. I don't think there's anything I could do for him to top this -- well, except maybe allowing him to turn our entire front, side and back yard into vegetable gardens, installing rain barrels on the ends of every downspout, increasing our compost heaps and installing solar panels on our roof. I love my husband dearly, but if his steaming compost pile gets to be larger than the size of our car this winter or if rows of corn suddenly burst out of our lawn this spring, he'd better be prepared to pedal fast on whatever two wheeler he has in his possession because I'll be chasing him in my four wheeler that runs on non renewable resources!

Fire Truck Bike

Here's the bike dressed up as a fire truck. We used red poster board, a little construction paper and put mirror images on both sides of the cargo bucket. Okay, so maybe I spent a little too much time on it and got more excited about it than the kids, but that can be our little secret.

Halloween

We dressed up the bike as a fire truck for Halloween and picked the kids up from school in a fire truck bike. The moment I saw the red on the bike, I knew that's what I wanted to do for Halloween. I even bought a little fireman's outfit for my son. Sadly, my son did not share my passion. He wanted to be a lion. So, for Halloween, we had a fire truck sporting a fairy princess and a lion.

Bike Picture

Hey all-
Just wanted to quickly post a picture of the bike - since it is halfway through the challenge and you might be interested in seeing what the bike looks like. So here it is. I'll post an update on what we have been doing in a day or two.

--CFD

Half-way there

I think we're just about half-way in this car-free challenge and so far, going car-free hasn't been a problem. We're taking a little more time to plan our trips and getting more acquainted with our public transportation system, but these are not bad things.

We've taken the bike out to take the kids to buy Halloween costumes, go grocery shopping, take the kids to school, take the kids to church and take the kids to see their god parents. Although we haven't ventured more than a few miles from our house with it, we've used it to travel distances that we normally would have driven.

A photographer from the local paper stopped by this morning to take pictures of my husband carting the kids off to school. It would have been nice if it was warmer out so you could actually see the kids, but it's gotten so cold out that we've been riding around with the rain cover on. I haven't seen the photos, but I can't imagine you can see them at all in their little plastic bubble.