Commuting - Unexpected Benefit of Commuting

I'm familiar with the vast majority of the benefits of commuting, and I know one is being independent from my car. If what happened today had done so a couple of months ago, I'd be shelling out money for a rental or bugging friend's for rides. Just this afternoon, the lower ball joint on the front, passenger side of my car decided that it wanted to separate, leaving my car sitting in the middle of a parking lot with a wheel not connected to the car by enough components to function.

The quarter panel is a little messed up, but I'm thankful that it didn't happen while I was on the freeway driving back from a LAN Party.

Most of my friends and family, however, would be freaking out about how they'd be getting to and from work, or school as it may be, without a car. Me? Yeah, I'm upset, but I won't be forking over dough for a rental car because I've gotten into cycling.

A whole lot of "it could have been so much worse" going on, in terms of damage to the car, me, or my work schedule.

It's definatly a blessing that it happened in a parking lot. That could have been ugly.

I have the advantage of never having a totally reliable motor vehicle! Reliable, but not totally. My BMW is from 1984 with ?? miles. was 224,000 years ago when the odometer broke. And my 1991 truck has 220,000 miles, but seems to work.

So I'm used to having a wrecker show up!

I had to order a rather odd part for the windshield wipers of my nissan sentra. Between identifying the part (nobody could find what it was) to finding a place to order it, and getting it shipped, it ended up being 3 weeks without windshield wipers. When the part finally came, I had completely forgot about it and stared at it for an hour before I remembered what it was.

Car repairs don't bother me, either. I went through an episode last month where I had to take my car back to the shop 5 times before they could get everything corrected. The shop was within walking distance, so it was no biggie (even though the manager kept offering me a ride). I was able to get to my temp job just fine on a bike, so I wasn't throwing a big fit like most other customers would. ...It did put me in a place to get much free labor, though. :)

Another big advantage is you don't need someone else give you a ride to pick up your '91 accord POS that likes to eat distributors.

Just hop on ride and ride it there.

It's also nice having your "life boat" already in the car when it does break.

BTW, I do still love my accord, so long as it get more than 20K miles out of this new distributor.

Yeah.... My car is in the body shop cause some guy backed into me a couple weeks back (at the bike shop... lol). I was cool with it. Then I took a spill doing about 30 w/ my feel clipped in. Now I'm hanging out messed up on vicodin to take some of the pain out of my knee. So now I don't have a car and I can't ride my bike. I'm actually more upset about not being able to ride my bike.

When something breaks on the car it always seems to cost at least five hundred. When something breaks on the bike it costs like 10 bucks to fix (or even zero to fix it myself)...

I got a flat the other day in my car, my reaction to seeing it was pretty much "sweet, now that I can't give my friend a ride I can ride to work today"