A Not-Quite-Car-Free Vacation

To celebrate our five-year wedding anniversary, Dave and I took a trip to the coast. We bounced around all sorts of bike-centric ideas, but by the time I was making reservations, Dave's neck was feeling stiff from his first week working and commuting, and he wanted a few days off the bike to recover.

Instead, we decided to explore one of the other perks of selling the car: the ability to choose the best car for the job out of the zipcar fleet. Saturday's forecast looked beautiful and we had no kids, almost no luggage, and no particular plans beyond a hotel to stay in. So we chose the car best suited for the job:


See, while neither of us like the idea of living in a car (or raising kids in one), we both actually really enjoy driving cars. A guilty pleasure, sure, but there it is. And while we owned a car, we owned a very sensible one: a compact '01 Ford Focus with a surprisingly large carrying capacity and pretty good mileage. It was extraordinarily rare that we'd need any other car to get us around, and we certainly weren't the sorts to go renting a car when we didn't need it.

But now, owning no car, and being in need of a car-for-the-weekend, we got to pick up this beauty, named Multnomah by her zipcar keepers, from her home at NW 10th and Johnson, right off the streetcar line. We headed to the beach with the top down all the way, getting pleasantly baked in the sunshine and feeling very fancy as we cruised in to dinner. And on Sunday, when persistent rain spoiled our plans for a long hike, Multnomah was there to take us for a long, windy drive along the coast.

As we cruised back into town, taking advantage of the quick transport to go see a house for rent and to pick up some groceries, I realized that I really didn't miss owning a car. And then came one of the nicest parts of the weekend: pulling the car back into her reserved space, clearing out our things, and zapping her shut again: reservation over, no longer our responsibility. And that felt great.