"On the Road Again"

I have always loved to drive.  Evidently, I still do!  I just never realized quite how much!  This was brought home to me today when I realized that sometime this week or next, my odometer will turn to 64,000 miles.  By itself, the number really isn't that bad.  In fact, my  favorite car, my little red Fiero, ended up with over 130,000 miles on it when it finally gave up the ghost....but I had that car for 14 YEARS!

The car I am driving now is a 2006 Kia Sportage that I got (new) in October of 2007.  That is just three and a half years ago.....and I am not even driving to work every day anymore!  On average, that works out to approximately 18,000 miles a year; or about 1,500 miles a month or even more astounding, that's an average of 50 miles a DAY!!   How is that possible??  I hardly ever go anywhere but around town!  No wonder it feels like I have to get gas every other day!

I made one trip to Arkansas, two summers ago, but that's the only excursion I would consider a long distance trip.   It wasn't all that far anyway.

The rest adds up for rather simple reasons.  Most of my car trips around town are within the city limits of Austin, but nothing is close to anything else!  To drive from my house to Ratchlet's house is almost 20 miles, one way!  Also, no matter where I am going, I must first get to the entrance of the development in which we live.  It is almost exactly one mile from our garage to the entrance.  If I make three separate trips from home and back again for errands, and such, that's 6 miles just leaving and returning!

When we moved here from California and bought this house, we had spent ten years living in different states than Ratchlet did.  After that, 20 miles seemed a snap!  Now, after ten years here, that 20 miles no longer feels like a snap!  Mostly it feels like a long, long way away sometimes, especially anytime around rush hour.

Now I am not blaming my trips to and from Ratchlet's house for the high mileage, some weeks I don't even go there at all.  I just spend a lot of my time in the car going hither, thither and yon (which are a lot farther away than they used to be!)

So at the rate I am accumulating those miles, reaching my previous high of 130,000 miles on just one car, should only take around  7.2 years!  Yikes!  That is half as long as it took to get to that level when we were in California, which isn't that easy to get around in either!  At 64,000 miles,  I'm already halfway there!

Well, cripes!  I must just about live in that car!   So why does it feel like I never go anywhere???   If I'm gonna spend that much time in my car, somebody should write a song about it!   Hmmm, too bad "On the Road Again" is already taken!