If you know me or if you’ve been reading for a few weeks, you might remember that my husband and I gave up a car for Lent. We have two of them and most of the time, one or both is sitting in the condo parking lot where we live. I’m home most of the time and Doug takes the train to work so recently we started thinking that maybe having two cars was a bit excessive. Since Lent was coming up, we decided to give having just one car a shot. This is going to be a pretty text-heavy post, so I’ll intersperse it with some pictures of Chester in vehicles.

On the road to Middleburg.

We’re happy to report that so far, it’s all worked out well. Doug had to take the car to work twice, once with a lot of notice and once with hardly any notice. Neither day did it impact my schedule much. The first time, I cleaned the house and started a book I’d really been wanting to read. If I’d had the car, I probably would have gone out thrifting or something so it was a good opportunity for some quiet time. The second day, I was going to take the dog to our groomer, but it wasn’t a big deal to postpone that to the next day since we didn’t have an appointment.

The Lowes in Woodbridge allows dogs.

We’ve also had a couple of Saturdays where either Doug or I stayed home while the other of us went out did our normal Saturday things. Last weekend we went and had pancakes at church and I stayed on for a meeting of Fairfax Independent Artists and Crafters, a Meetup group I belong to, while Doug went back home and did some laundry. He came and fetched me when we were done. Even though it meant waiting around for the meeting to start and then waiting again for Doug to come pick me up, that was okay too. I had a good conversation with someone I don’t know all that well at church and also answered some emails I’d gotten that required more thoughtful responses than just dashing off a quick yes or no.

Okay, so it’s more conveyance than vehicle.

Basically, we’re still having a hard time envisioning circumstances where having only one car could be a problem. In other words, so far, so good!

Chester, explain to me how this is comfortable?