Episode #273: From A Young Foot Patrol To An Old Foot Patrol

Gotta love the duck, for they only have three modes of transportation and doesn't give three quacks over which one to use at a given moment in time.

This past week has made me realize that I've come full circle with my modes of transportation.

To elaborate: after 16 years spent acquiring 132k+ very hard miles, it decided to throw a tantrum and drop its transmission. Under normal circumstances, I would simply say "adieu" and go through the aggravating/time consuming process of acquiring another dependable car.

Here's the thing though: after spending a solid month thinking about it, I decided to get another car for myself and keep this car as a proverbial back up/second car. Which means biting the bullet and having this one one brought back to working order (if you take about 6% of the aforementioned mileage, you will have a basic idea on how much this repair is going to cost me).

Which brings us to the topic at hand.

When we were young, foot patrol was our main method of transportation until we got our bicycle. That became our main mode (with obvious exceptions) until we acquired our first motorized vehicle. As we got older, foot patrol became a dependable/necessary back up when motorized transportation wasn't available. Sure, we would grumble about it, but we dealt with it to the best of our abilities.

Spending a week (actually 10 days) without a car made me realize how fortunate I am that reverting to foot patrol to run certain errands doesn't bother me as much as maybe five years ago. Five years ago, it was a major pain in the butt not to have access to other motorized transportation when my primary mode isn't available. I didn't have access to a bicycle anymore (safety concerns then and now) and walking was a pain in the butt to run my errands.*

*note: I live in the northern end of town where it's a forty minute walk to the center to run certain errands and an hour walk to the next town to run certain others.

Fast forward to now. Now walking is much easier for me to deal with, because less weight makes faster walking with less pain. So the majority of my time sans car was spent walking to run at least one of my night errands earlier in the afternoon. I did have access to a car to run a few important errands, but overall, I found I wasn't really inconvenienced by being on foot patrol.

I actually found the experience quite enjoyable, and to be honest, this past Friday (5/2), having to run two key errands, banking and lottery, was actually a snap to perform. It took me 2 1/2 hours to execute a large circular trip to the center (bank), then back towards home (not really) to the package store to run the second part of my errand, then finally back to home.

What helped me a lot was taking two viable shortcuts that saved me about 1 1/2 hours of extra walking time. Seven years worth of hardcore walking allowed me to plot out the shortest distance between two points on numerous occasions, and this walk was no exception. Think about it, if a normal walk to a particular destination took you close to forty-five minutes and you found a route that covered the exact same distance in thirty minutes, would you not take it?

I'm not sure if my new ambivalent attitude about walking has something to do with being a semi-Luddite when it came to technology as an adult. I'm a child of the 70's/80's, so the Internet wasn't a thing for me until the advent of Google in the 90's. I definitely was a half dozen steps behind when it came to both cell phones and smart phones, so being glued to my phone isn't as severe as other people have it. As for computers, no real exposure until I started working for the government in the late 90's.

In any event, I believe when you get older, it's possible to not be so concerned about transportation issues when you have a lot of time on your hands, and no real immediate need to actually do something with that excess time. As the old saying goes, work smarter, not harder. Or in my case, prior planning prevents poor performance.

How about you, do you find yourself not really worried/concerned when your normal mode of transportation has decided to take a short holiday and you have to improvise?

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