Christina Goes Carless

When I was 18 years old, my parents got me driving lessons from a slightly sketchy but very cool driving instructor who taught me “defensive driving”. It turns out my initial instincts about my driving ability were spot on: the instructor said I would be OK, but that driving sure didn’t come naturally to me.  Boy, was he right. I always hit the curb when parking and have a tendency to bump stationary objects. Within a week of purchasing my first grown-up car after graduating college, a 2008 Dodge Stratus, I had scraped all four sides of it while attempting to successfully turn into my apartment's one-car garage. Still, especially as a print reporter in rural Nevada, and later at newspaper 50 miles away from my home in Arizona, there was no getting around driving. The day it occurred to me that now I work from home and most of our regular haunts are 5 miles (or less!) away, I felt like I’d had the kind of epiphany that changes the course of mankind. Maybe, just ma...

The GRID bike bay at Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona. I’d forgotten that when riding a bike, there is always a light breeze blowing on your face. Riding a bike transforms ordinary street infrastructure like parking lots into playgrounds and double-dog-dare-you obstacle courses. Curbs become invitations for mildly courageous feats, like yanking the handlebars up just as the front tire leaves pavement in an attempt to land on the street under the curb with only the bike’s back wheel. To ride a bike, even if only at moderate speed, is to grab velocity's hand and tweak gravity’s nose as you both ignore its incontestable authority. Bike riding is a joyous act of rebellion against physics itself. As I rode, even though I remained firmly on the ground, I still had the giddy, happy sense that although this wasn’t actually flying, it surely must have something to do with it. How had I forgotten that? It took only a few minutes for everything I’d forgotten I loved about bi...

What this blog IS This blog chronicles the (mis)adventures of an unathletic, overweight, clumsy woman in her mid-30s going carless in Phoenix, Arizona. That may not seem like a blog-worthy big deal, but I haven’t ridden a bike in any real sense in at least 20 years and haven't had to use public transport since I was a teenager. I'm also not great at reading maps and by "not great" I mean "totally incompetent". I am  pretty handy, being a fountain pen tinkerer and take-apart-the-toaster kind of gal, so I'm actually looking forward to learning about bike maintenance, but I suspect there will still be plenty of surprises in store. I'd like this blog to be useful to other people considering going carless who may not already be an avid cyclist. Whatever I learn, and how I learn it, you'll learn too by reading this blog. To prepare for this rather major transition, I’ve been doing a lot of research. That in and of itself has been an ey...