Carless...

In preparation for moving overseas, my wife and I have sold our car. Thankfully, it made a new P-plater very happy but it also means that I have been without a car for almost a week now.

Normally, this wouldn't bother me, however, we are staying with friends a little further away from things than what I am used to. I feel like a travelling gypsy, going from one place to another with no real home. The commute to work is now a 64km round trip via the bike and although everything I own has been condensed into 3 bags, transporting them can be a tedious task.

Despite this, I remain optimistic. The longer commute serves as extra training km's and the lack of a car has allowed me to get into touch with the Brisbane Public Bus service which I have not used since back in my University days. I can handle the trains but the bus system has always been too confusing for me to bother with. After one day of work without a car I was confident that there was not going to be any issues. But I forgot one thing...

In case you have been living in a cave, Brisbane and Queensland in general has been getting a lot of rain lately. The city is still recovering from floods and some parts are still completely shut down. Mother nature has continued to be cruel, and with a tropical cyclone hitting the northern coast, the rain is still coming.

Every morning I wake up to gray skies and pack my rain jacket into my back pocket. Although it is raining, the temperature and humidity are so high that a rain jacket is made redundant by the fact that you sweat so much underneath it and you end up just as wet but ten times more smelly. I spend a few hours riding in the wet and eventually make my way to work, arriving just as the sun comes out and the blue sky appears. I then spend the next hour washing the road grime and grit out of my kit and cleaning my bike. I hang my kit in the sun to dry and go back to work. When its time to go home, I just hope that it is dry and it isn't raining again.

So far, this has happened for four consecutive days. My optimism about not having a car is dwindling and as I am about to go to sleep, I am hoping that the sun is visible in the morning.