The Car Post

After 17 months of living car-free, we finally broke down and bought one. Actually, L.H. has been talking about it for a few months. Grocery shopping and other errands (like buying an office chair) are a bit of a pain when you can only buy as much as you can carry on the bus. We have already made it to one grocery store that would otherwise been out of reach for us, and managed to save about half on our weekly grocery bill. Of course, with a tank of gas at 45 Euros a pop (a Euro is currently valued at about 1.30 US dollars; you do the math), plus a limited amount of free parking in town, it wouldn't be affordable for us to drive the car to work daily. For trips to neighboring towns for D.D.'s Swedish and ballet lessons, though, it's going to save us a lot of time and hassle. We're also planning to drive it to Paris for a weekend in March. It'll be faster and probably somewhat cheaper than buying rail tickets.

Another perq of having the car that I realized on the bus was the stranger-free airspace. The man sitting next to me had either recently eaten a herring, or had perhaps forgotten his grocery bags and had stuffed his pockets full of them, I don't know. There was a distinct stench that I would have preferred to avoid.

BTW, the car is a blue Opel station wagon. It looks somewhat like this.