I finally did it. I finally got my car out the door, and right now it feels great.

I got my driver's license relatively late (I thought). I think I was about 25 years, and the reason I didn't need it until then was because I didn't have student OV anymore. I finished my studies and I finally wanted to start my working life, but I soon noticed that I would need a car for the vacancies in my field. And so I went to the driving school to take lessons and around the age of 25 I finally had my license. By now I had already found work in the city where I lived and that car was actually no longer needed. But anyway, for the trips to family in the south of the country my own transport was nice and so I enjoyed the freedom that a car brought with it.

After a couple of years, I moved to the South with my then partner and there the awareness about my car use started slowly. On the one hand quite crazy because where I came to live a car was much more useful than where I lived but I noticed that it started to bother me when my then partner took the car to bring an envelope to the mailbox. You see, that thing was at the end of the street. RIDICULOUS! But honestly, I didn't leave the car. I was still working in the Randstad and I just needed that car if I wanted to be in the office at half past nine. Then came the first 3 children and a car was also useful. Especially when the kindergarten and the school we had selected was not in the vicinity but could only be reached by car. I went to work as a freelancer and came to the customers home so the car was definitely useful. On the other hand, I left him (or her) as often as possible. Getting a little message, we walked to it. Family visits I prefer to do on foot. I thought it was decadent to pick up the car for everything and I also wanted to be a bit more conscious about “the globe we live on”. I encouraged my partner to get his motorcycle license so we only needed one car and he could take the bike to work.

After several years and in anticipation of sprout number 4 we moved to a village. Kids went to school there and there was a supermarket nearby and I bought a bike with a trailer on it to transport the youngest kids when the elders were in school. The engine was replaced for a small car and there was a bigger car because 4 children were transporting all of them in a child seat early for an adjustment. Although I was still deliberately trying to deal with our car consumption and use, over time a large car came to replace that little one. Actually, I can't remember why we made that choice at the time. Crazy, actually. Looking back now, I think it must have been a status symbol. Yeah, they were great cars, but we really didn't need two of them. I needed the big one because I stayed at home and took care of the children and had to take them everywhere and I couldn't do that by public transport, but two were really decadent behavior of us.

Then I got divorced. It turned out to be a lot of trouble to get rid of those cars, but I wanted to get rid of them. I didn't need a 6+ person car with five. I needed a car that still fitted 4 child seats and I wanted to drive LPG. And that's what I started doing. I found LPG driving an outcome (much cheaper driving and for my feeling better for the environment). Used cars, by the way. I became a member of the ANWB, and God, I needed those men. I think that in the years that followed I met most of the employees in the region where we lived. We even made a song to the melody of WMCA from the Village People. I don't know the whole text anymore, but it started like this: “And we call the ANWB again”. In the first years after the divorce, I really needed those cars. But I did notice that when the elders went to high school, I was going to drastically reduce my car use. When number 2 was in high school, I took the youngest from school and placed them in an elementary school in the neighborhood where I lived at the time. Previously, I drove all four of them to school, 22 km away. As long as I didn't have a permanent residence I didn't want to take them out of school because when I moved the elders were in grades 8 and 7 and that was also a bad time for a school change. That was a wonderful moment. Do not stand in traffic jams every day, do not constantly drive up and down, walking to sports clubs. I thought it was a liberation.