94,250, give or take a thousand.
That's how far I haven't driven in the past 14 and a half years.
I don't know why this popped into my
head; it was probably because I was running in the rain and strange things pop
into my head while I'm running in the rain. Or maybe it was the fact that I
wrote a blog yesterday about what's left of the street outside my
house. But either way, while I was running this morning I started
thinking about how little I've driven (and used the torn up street
outside my house) in the 14 and a half years since my place of
employment moved from Ishpeming to a location within walking distance
of where I live in Marquette. If I was still working out there and
making the 25-mile round trip once a day (and I usually did it more
than that) I would've driven those 94,000+ miles I mentioned at the
beginning of this.
I would've driven the equivalent of
going around the planet three times, and then driving the long way
from Marquette to Japan just for extra kicks.
That would've been a lot of driving.
There are two other ways I could look
at those 94,250 miles. If all of those miles were driven at 50 miles
per hour (because they were a mix of city & highway), I've been
spared 1,885 hours of sitting in a car. That's almost 79 days.
That's over 2 and a half months of my life that would've otherwise
been spent driving back & forth.
Yikes!
And, of course, you could also look at
it from a financial point of view. Assuming I had to drive those
94,250 (give or take a thousand) miles in a car that got 35 miles to
the gallon, I would've had to buy 2,693 gallons of gas. Now, let's
assume that the average gas price over the past 14 years was $2.50 a
gallon, about where it is now (and that's just a rough assumption on
my part). That means that by not driving over the past 14 and a half
years I've saved over $6,700 in gas. And that's not counting car
repairs, new batteries when it got so cold out my old one would've
died, or the fact that I haven't had to buy a new car since, uhm,
1997, and well...
Let's just I've come out on the good
end of this whole deal.
I don't actually have a point in
writing this (like most of these ramblings), other than the fact that
weird thoughts pop into my head while I'm running. But it's amazing
what those weird thoughts can lead to, especially when you sit down
and do the math behind them.
Now, if you don't mind, I have to go
walk to work (and pass my favorite lilac tree in the process), so
until tomorrow...
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