Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Oh, the Places We Go - Our Car Journal

I love my Subaru Outback. It's got plenty of space for a car seat, Will's stroller, and all the baby gear you'd ever need for a weekend in Maine. It hauls garden plants and top soil like it was made for it, and in the winter, it could safely transport a Floridian driver down unplowed New England roads.

Plus, it reminds me of my first car, a blue 1983 Subaru GL hatchback that I loved right up past it's nineteenth birthday when my parents had to sell it because it wouldn't wait the long winters for me to come home from college, and I couldn't bring it with me to Atlanta.

Seeing my excitement about my Subaru, and knowing how I hope to have this car for years, Greg came up with the brilliant idea of keeping a car journal. Every thousand miles, I pull out a little notebook from the glove compartment and record the date, mileage, and where we're going.

I've got 12 entries now, and they're little snippets of our lives and the places the car has taken us. They start before Will was born, and even before our house was done. Trips to Maine. Prenatal yoga. Cat to the vet. Dinner with friends. Costco and lunch with Greg and Will.

As an added benefit, I now keep much better track of my mileage, which means my scheduled maintenance happens much closer to when it should. Never a bad thing with a baby on board.

I look forward to seeing where I'll be each time the odometer ticks over another thousand, and I love reading the little snippets of our lives that might otherwise be forgotten. It captures everyday living, the moments that otherwise get lost as not important enough to photograph or write about, despite their being the bulk of our experience.

And I think that's kind of neat.

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