Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll tell you that I love to drive. In fact, I joke that in my former life, I was a long-haul truck driver. I think it comes from my Grandad Caruthers, a former bomber pilot. He loved to drive too.
I have done a LOT of driving over the past two months. Just on 12 days of big trips, I have driven 5,312 miles to be exact. I might get a couple more miles for driving around town. Some of the miles have been shared (Jared drove to Dayton, and John and both drove to and from airports), but I was still sitting in a car. Suffice it to say that I am VERY tired of driving.
Here are some highlights:
Music lessons in Philadelphia every Wednesday. As Johannah and I have been making the college rounds, without exception, people look at us like we are insane when they hear we drive to Philadelphia each week. It's a eight hour, round trip drive. Find me a quality teacher in our area, and I'll stop driving!
Running Festivals. September and October are running festival months for John and the rest of us. We drove to Dulles to catch our flight to Orlando to run in the Tower of Terror Ten Miler. We drove to Dayton for the Air Force Marathon, and we drove to Baltimore for the Baltimore Marathon.
College Visits. Thankfully, most of the colleges that Johannah is considering are on this side of the country. I can't deny that we don't save a lot of money driving instead of flying. We have driven on a Sunday afternoon up to Rochester, NY, only to return home the next evening. We left at 5:30 a.m. (after getting up at 4:45) to drive to Berea, OH (outside of Cleveland), arriving at 10 a.m. We then left Berea at 2:30, driving straight to Ann Arbor. We drove the six hours home the next day. The one bright side? Penn State was a short 15-minute drive for Hannie :-)
Birthday Season. When I bought tickets for Hannie and me to attend a Sara Bareilles concert in New York City, I was thinking I was off the hook. Megabus goes directly from State College to NYC. I bought the tickets for the concert, only to discover that NYC is now leveraging huge taxes on Megabus, and one ticket, one way was $120. One tank of gas and one discount parking garage didn't even top out at $100. I drove in at 4 p.m. and we left at 11 p.m. I drank a lot of diet Coke on the way home, pulling into the garage at 3 a.m.
When we are at Interlochen each summer, we can go a week without turning the key in the car. It is fiscally freeing to ride a bike or walk everywhere (including the grocery store). I pride myself on the amount of money we save by not driving anywhere.
There's no doubt I have made up for all of that savings (and more!) in the past two months.
*sigh*
I have done a LOT of driving over the past two months. Just on 12 days of big trips, I have driven 5,312 miles to be exact. I might get a couple more miles for driving around town. Some of the miles have been shared (Jared drove to Dayton, and John and both drove to and from airports), but I was still sitting in a car. Suffice it to say that I am VERY tired of driving.
Here are some highlights:
Music lessons in Philadelphia every Wednesday. As Johannah and I have been making the college rounds, without exception, people look at us like we are insane when they hear we drive to Philadelphia each week. It's a eight hour, round trip drive. Find me a quality teacher in our area, and I'll stop driving!
Running Festivals. September and October are running festival months for John and the rest of us. We drove to Dulles to catch our flight to Orlando to run in the Tower of Terror Ten Miler. We drove to Dayton for the Air Force Marathon, and we drove to Baltimore for the Baltimore Marathon.
College Visits. Thankfully, most of the colleges that Johannah is considering are on this side of the country. I can't deny that we don't save a lot of money driving instead of flying. We have driven on a Sunday afternoon up to Rochester, NY, only to return home the next evening. We left at 5:30 a.m. (after getting up at 4:45) to drive to Berea, OH (outside of Cleveland), arriving at 10 a.m. We then left Berea at 2:30, driving straight to Ann Arbor. We drove the six hours home the next day. The one bright side? Penn State was a short 15-minute drive for Hannie :-)
Birthday Season. When I bought tickets for Hannie and me to attend a Sara Bareilles concert in New York City, I was thinking I was off the hook. Megabus goes directly from State College to NYC. I bought the tickets for the concert, only to discover that NYC is now leveraging huge taxes on Megabus, and one ticket, one way was $120. One tank of gas and one discount parking garage didn't even top out at $100. I drove in at 4 p.m. and we left at 11 p.m. I drank a lot of diet Coke on the way home, pulling into the garage at 3 a.m.
When we are at Interlochen each summer, we can go a week without turning the key in the car. It is fiscally freeing to ride a bike or walk everywhere (including the grocery store). I pride myself on the amount of money we save by not driving anywhere.
There's no doubt I have made up for all of that savings (and more!) in the past two months.
*sigh*
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