Where possible, walk.

My first option is to walk. It's surprising how manageable a lot of walks are. When you walk you realise NOT how far away things are, but how CLOSE they are. The shopping centre 2 suburbs away seem like too far to walk, but turns out to be under an hour. An hour seems like a long time to walk, but it's really not when you consider that you aren't just getting from A to B, you are also raising your metabolism, decreasing stress, absorbing Vitamin D, circulating blood through your body, and looking at a lot of houses and gardens and interesting back streets. Also, although it will take longer than the bus, by the time you get to the bus stop and wait for the bus, the length added to the trip time is often negligible given the health benefit of the walk PLUS it reduces the travel cost to $0.

Disadvantages of walking where possible: Ugly comfortable footwear. Ugly comfortable bag. Tendency to arrive slightly sweaty (or glowing) and a little bit frumpy in joggers and shorts and a backpack, rather than alighting at the door in sandals, freshly groomed and sporting a chic handbag.

I love the word 'alighting' re: public transport. And 'sporting' re: outfit.

While this post was in draft, Elsie sent me this article much better than mine. Full of quotes. Go and read the quotes by classy writerly gentlemen: they say it much more elegantly than I have. I think the pilgrimage idea is taking it a little to far, but the idea of being over-reliant on the wheel at all costs make me pump my fist in the air:

“When I see the discomforts that ablebodied American men will put up with rather than go a mile or half a mile on foot, the abuses they will tolerate and encourage, crowding the street car on a little fall in the temperature or the appearance of an inch or two of snow, packing up to overflowing, dangling to the straps, treading on each other’s toes, breathing each other’s breaths, crushing the women and children, hanging by tooth and nail to a square inch of the platform, imperiling their limbs and killing the horses—I think the commonest tramp in the street has good reason to felicitate himself on his rare privilege of going afoot. Indeed, a race that neglects or despises this primitive gift, that fears the touch of the soil, that has no footpaths, no community of ownership in the land which they imply, that warns off the walker as a trespasser, that knows no way but the highway, the carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the foot-bridge, that even ignores the rights of the pedestrian in the public road, providing no escape for him but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to far more serious degeneracy.” –John Burroughs, “The Exhilarations of the Road,” 1895

Amen to that.

I've been doing a 90 min walk to work, leaving at 7am. It used to feel very long, but now it's a good length. I don't even always listen to my iPod. Today I am planning on walking home from work instead of to work. The morning walk is lovely and crisp, but the evening bus is packed and smothering and I'm getting motion sick, so this morning I caught an early bus to work, civilised and quiet and undercrowded, and I will walk home this evening.