Rad Fahren (Driving my Bike)

One of the best things about this summer so far is the freedom to finally experiment with how little I can use my car, and how much I can expand the radius within which I am comfortable biking.

I've had a bike since I moved to Lawrence, and I've had two legs for about 24.9 years now, but I had a mental block to really using them as my main forms of transportation, and that mental block was the 70 mile round-trip daily commute to teach.  It just didn't seem to make much difference whether I biked the 7 blocks to the bank or drove, when I was burning 2 gallons of gas minimum every week day regardless.  And anyway, I could hit the bank on the way home from work, adding only 2 blocks to my drive.

This summer however is the first time I have gotten to take advantage of the fact that I really do have everything I need within walking and biking distance in Lawrence.  In addition to the bank, all of my favorite restaurants, bars and shops are 3 blocks away on Massachussetts Street.  The grocery store is less than a mile.  CJ's house is 5 blocks.  The clincher, the icing on the cake, is that my summer job is just down the country roads east of my house, at the Buller Family Farm.   And in contrast to teaching, no one will comment or notice if I show up already sweaty for work.

The first week of biking was like a honeymoon period--Ah the breeze in my face! Ah the pleasant burn in my legs! Ah the joys of watching the countryside go by at a slightly slower speed!  It didn't last long.  My conviction to shun my car was challenged a few days in, by the out-of-the-ordinary task of renewing my car's registration.  Luckily the courthouse is only 5 blocks from my house here in East Lawrence, and so I hopped on my bike, paperwork in hand, already filled out and ready to go.

I arrived at the courthouse a little sweaty but excited to get this task out of the way so efficiently, and without my car... I spent a good 10 minutes in line, enjoying the over-airconditioned lobby and staring at the sign that said "No Proof of Insurance, No Registration," before it dawned on me where my proof of car insurance was.  In my car, of course.

One of my biggest annoyances with myself is screwing up a simple task and having to do it twice.

I rushed out to my bike and my first frustrated thought was "UGH! I'll just bike home and drive back over here!!" As if biking 10 more blocks would be a horrible waste of energy, as if taking an extra 20 minutes to fix my own mistake would be a horrible use of time on a day when I wasn't working and didn't have any other important tasks to accomplish anyway. My second thought (more sheepish this time) was, "Wow, there went my resolve. That didn't take much..."

I did bike back over, proof of insurance safely stashed in my wallet, but I had to give myself a stern talking-to.  By the end of that first week I realized there were also a few things on my wish list to make my bike-transportation more pleasant.

1) new handlebars that don't make me lean forward like I'm on a bike race everywhere I go,
2) cushier seat, to replace the hard rounded red plastic seat (ow...)
3) bike rack and baskets, so I can actually use it to make grocery runs without stuffing everything in a backpack and then sweating all over it,
4) tire pump that attaches to my bike to fix flats on-the-go,
5) gear shifters that I can use without removing my hands from the handlebars,
6) a rear-view mirror (why aren't those just standard on all bikes? It's WAY less safe to be ignorant of what's behind you on a bike than in a car!)

I started wondering whether I just wanted an entirely different bike to ride.  But then, I discovered the key to biking or walking no matter what...  On the way back from Kansas City one evening, I made the unpleasant discovery that my car's headlights only worked when they wanted to.  They could be nursed along with strategic and emphatic application of the turn signals, but they shut off intermittently anyway.  It turned out the switch that controlled my lights and windshield wipers had "gone bad," and its replacement wasn't cheap.

While I was at it I figured I might as well take care of the other persistent and ever-more-consistently occurring problem, and that is the small issue of the floor-board flooding after a rainstorm.  It's not pleasant opening up a car that has standing water in it, but it IS easy to ignore the problem when the car and the weather are dry (which explains the fact that I have gone 3 years ignoring this problem).  My mechanics recommended a glass expert who is a wiz at figuring out leaks, but after doing his best diagnosis, he gave me two pieces of bad news: 1) I can't fix it and 2) whoever does is going to charge you a lot of money.

My next stop (I drove straight there from the glass shop) was a body shop, a spiffy and friendly little place run by a mom, dad and son.  I knew it was going to be a good place for me to get my car fixed when the family corgy came out from under the waiting room chairs to sit on my feet and look longingly up at me while I scratched her ears.  The Pearsons said they couldn't promise that they would even find the leak, let alone fix it, and joked that maybe I should consider embracing the problem and stocking my floorboard ponds with goldfish.

A week later I got my car back with two pieces of great news: 1) My car now has much better drainage and, most significantly, less overflow of water into my floorboards, and 2) The cost of fixing the leak, in the end, was less than a third of the cost of fixing the headlight switch.  I was thankful for having the leakage fixed because the following week saw one rainstorm after another.  I didn't have to wake up during a pleasant summer rain wondering how much water I would have to scoop out the next day.  I rode my bike to work through it all--after three weeks, I was pretty used to the one-mile ride, rain or shine.

Yesterday, though, was the first day I drove my car to work.  My bike's wimpy road tires had collapsed thanks to a particularly gravelly patch of road.  As I added up the costs of the repairs and changes I want on my bike anyway, I decided to start combing the craigslist classifieds for a different bike after all...

(to be continued...)