Well now, I have to admit that I am not the kind of person who enjoys riding in cars. As any normal Top Gear watching geek, I do enjoy driving an amazing and powerfull car or going on a 4×4 excursion every now and then but the act of using a car to get from A to B I find not only exceedingly boring but particularly frustrating. Especially in cities where every other car is right there smack middle in your way. Needless to say I can get pretty angy when driving. My fantastic solution to the problem is not to use a car at all! Most of my life can be arranged so that I dont have to use the car. When we lived in Miðstræti I walked to work, walked to the pub, walked to the sailingclub, walked to the coffeeshop, walked to the park and walked to the cinema. Everything was close at hand and I have very little use for the car. Admittedly getting the groceries is a pain without the car but everything else was fine. For the whole two years we lived there, this was my life and the car was no major component in it. A friendly little bugger called James actually. Most of our time spent together was me cleaning and waxing. Then we moved to the burbs about 6 months ago now. The INNER burbs mind you, I´ll have none of that outer burbs crap thank you very much. And all of a sudden me and James become best pals. We ride together to work, to the shop, to Suzes work, to the cinema, to the gym and even to the video store sometimes (how lazy is that). From the moment we moved to the burbs I vowed to start cycling to work but for a long time, nothing happened. To be honest the Icelandic winter is nothing to look forward to so I did have something of an excuse. Eventually though I decided to make good on my promise to my self and get the bikes into shape with the intention of cycling to work instead of driving. At this stage the relationship between me and James was getting a little frosty. It was just one of those too-much-time-spent-togeter thing. James is a fantastic car and it wasnt really his problem. Spending my time in a car is just not what I like to do. Finally then, after almost half a year of living in the burbs I got my act together and started cycling to work. It was actually much easier than I had anticipated and so pleasant to spend time in the fresh air doing a little excersise before starting the working day. I now cycle to work most days, even on the really cold, rainy windy days. Today I even brought my other old friend a long, my GPS. Me and my Garmin GPS 12 go more than a decade back and have spent some very exciting times together. Today Garmin told me the stats about my ride to work
- Max speed: 62.2 km/h (actually this might be a lie, Garmin is only human)
- Average speed: 22 km/h
- Distance: 4,4 km
- Elapsed time: 12 minutes
To compare this to riding with James to work it rarely takes less than 15 minutes to get to work due to traffic and traffic lights in the morning rush hour. It has actually taken about 45 minutes to get home from work during especially heavy traffic and frequently takes 30 minutes. In fact getting home during peak hours rarely takes less than 20 very frustrating minutes.
