Another blog?!

Here I go again.  Admittedly, I have started a couple blogs in the past, in addition to my old stand by "Three Little Monkeys" that have fizzled and died.  I am hoping for a longer and healthier life for this little blog.

This is going to be my little place to chronicle our adventures and experiments in "car lite" living.  Mainly, it will serve as my logbook and journal so that I can gauge our growth as well as our commitment.

Hopefully people will follow along here at "CarLite and Carefree" and possibly be inspired by our crazy ideas!

To familiarize people with where we are and how we got here, I'll give you a brief background to our car lite adventure.  (For a more detailed description of us, check out my blog "Three Little Monkeys"!)

So here's our story.  I am a small but pretty out of shape mama to five sweet kids ranging from ages 10 down to 2.  My hubby is much less out of shape and has enjoyed bike riding for a while now.  For the past few years we have been cruising around town in a beater mini van or our gas guzzling 12 passenger van.  A few months ago, our beater van finally kicked the bucket (it had actually been totaled in a fender bender almost three years ago and we were still sucking life out of it, so when I say it died, I'm pretty serious!).

We were now down to one car which at first seemed a little less than convenient.  We have five kids, Andrew works across town, we have errands to run and places to go.  That means we need two cars, right?!  But we enjoyed the challenge and didn't really see a new car in our already tight budget.  We figured Andrew could ride the bus to work and I could have the car most days.  He also enjoyed riding his bike to work a few days a week.

The kids have always been good riders and love riding around with Andrew.  I had a cute, but impractical vintage RoadMaster.  We decided to put the word out that we were looking for a decent commuter bike and try to incorporate riding into our daily lives a little more.

Little did we know where this would lead.  Our friends at the bike shop let us know that they had a used bike we might like.  In his words "I have a used Kona Ute because a couple is upgrading to a Surly Big Dummy."  New to the world of utility bikes, he may as well have been speaking Chinese.  I had no idea what he was talking about.

But then I saw the Ute and was pulled into the world of utility commuter bikes.  We walked away with the Ute that night and I have barely driven my big van since!