Four Wheels!

[ase]

The logical thing to do, when you get your Zipcar membership card (convenient portmanteau: zipcard) is to reserve a car Friday night and make plans for errands the next morning. (The 1 AM slightly tipsy part? Let's pretend that it was part of the plan. Like Ron Moore's plans!) So instead of dodging rain-slash-mist and single tracking, I drove all over the place for four and a half hours on Saturday. It was fun, and more exciting, I can do it again. On weekday evenings! When I want to see friends who live 30 miles away! Or are really inconvenient to get to via public transit! Also, since I can reserve time on any vehicle in the Zipcar fleet, I get to try different cars if I want. I am super tempted to rent one of the Tacoma pickups for an hour and just drive it around the parking lot scaring myself silly.

I also live for the day I can drive a bass-booming monster sound system down the road, but that's going to be a different day: I had a base model on Saturday, and I bet the rest of the fleet is similarly economical. Now I know that a left-hand mirror I have to reeeeeaaaach across the car to adjust is kind of a deal-killer for any car I buy. Another no-go: speedometers organized so that the 20-40 mph range is hard to read or makes me take my eyes off the road. This may seem petty until you consider my problem with 25 mph zones and speed cameras. Also, eyes off the road? Not on.

One of my college friends called out of the blue this evening, and we killed her phone catching up. It is so cool to talk to people who you haven't seen in a while. Also, now I have an excuse to go to Ann Arbor this summer! (Because what I really needed this summer was more people to see. Augh. I can't take two weeks and a couple thousand dollars so I can couch-surf my way across the USA. Darn those pesky expensive plane tickets!) Someone should do a linguistic study of "anyway" as a bridge to a new topic; we were both doing it.

Oh! norabombay: DW money numbers. Just FYI. Also so I can find it again.

Comments

[hourglasscreate.livejournal.com]

Yay! How much does it run you?

[ase.livejournal.com]

It's prepay, so I can stop at $75/mo. But it's about $8.33/hr on weekdays and $10/hr on weekends. Call it $100/mo to do a couple Saturdays of errands each month. People keep trying to tell me renting a car for the day is cheaper - it may be for them, but I don't know how buying the "I don't own a car!" insurance would add to the bill.

[toraks.livejournal.com]

Yay for 4 wheels! :-D

glad you've found something you like!

I'm so bad at calling people these days. And I can even call them for free (we've got a free internet phone -- real phone -- with our broadband package). But the timing is so hard -- everyone I want to call is in the US. Oh well.

[ashcomp.livejournal.com]

Heh. That one really strikes home--we live in Maryland near Washington, but our daughter works in Tokyo. We try for a once-a-week Skype call, 8:00 a.m. our time, 10:00 p.m. hers. It seems to work most of the time. But that 14 hour difference is truly awkward.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Yay for 4 wheels! :-D

Oh, heck yes.

I'm so bad at calling people these days.

So email and set up a time? Try weekends - your 4 PM would be their 10 AM, so that might be doable.

[ashcomp.livejournal.com]

I could almost be tempted to sign up just to be able to rent a pickup sometime. But those occasions are just too widely spaced out. If you find your Zipcar charges approaching the vicinity of a car payment, well, it'll be time for another attack at the calculator.

[ase.livejournal.com]

There's a pay-as-you-go option, but you also have to pay an annual fee in that case.

My pie-in-the-sky guess for car costs is $300/mo ($200 car payment, $100 insurance, but I think those numbers are both wildly off), so if I ever pay $200/mo to Zipcar it's time to start calling insurance companies and hitting car websites. Or throttling back my car use: the entire point of Zipcar is to not get a car.

I'm also wondering about just renting a car occasionally, too: carrentals.com makes it sound really cheap to get a car for the weekend.