The leisure activities that we enjoy come with a hefty price tag. For example, to go golfing, you first need a golf course, which takes up 150 acres of land, half of which is fertilized, watered, and mowed with big riding mowers. Then you need to purchase appropriate clothing - a golf shirt, shorts or pants, spiked golf shoes, and golf gloves. Then you need equipment: clubs, balls, tees, a bag to hold it all, and a cart to wheel the bag around. Next, you need to drive to the golf course (because the golf bag won't fit on the back of your bike, and besides, that would turn a six-hour morning into an eight-hour morning.) When you get there, each player is required to have his own set of equipment, so that players won't waste time waiting for a club. At some courses, you also must use a golf cart to further increase the throughput of the course.
The story is the same with skiing, boating, travel, major and minor league sporting events, or even Little League baseball. Why is everything fun so wasteful? And does it always have to be that way? Obviously not, but there does seem to be a high correlation between energy expended and units of fun. As energy gets more expensive, the price per unit of fun goes up. Finding less wasteful ways to have fun is a fun challenge in itself. Not quite as fun as zooming across Cape Cod Bay at 30 m.p.h. powered by 16 liters of gas-guzzling internal combustion chambers. Or zooming down a mountain in Utah or Montana, having flown on an airplane and been towed up the mountain to get to the starting point for fun. Just now, the kids are down at the community-owned pool (which is better than our previous private pool,) having a fun swim in 80-degree water, heated by ... propane! Doh!
I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll just say that I'll be looking for green fun, and reporting it here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Well, we have recently started kayaking. We do have to take the kayaks to the lake on our SUV (which is NOT XLG, BTW) but it is only 2 miles. Are we mint green, at least?
Dino -- Let us know if your research covers the drag on a standard sedan (a Honda Civic, in our case) from plunking two bikes on it, and the resulting gas costs from that drag. Of course, we *should* be using the very same bikes to get gas-free someplace, but with a 500-ft elevation change between us and everywhere, that's not what I would call fun.
What is perfect is taking the bikes & the dog to the local (20+ miles away is "local" here) rail trail so that we can all bike together. We can combine that with a weekly trip to the library, but it's still not a great trade-off. Unfortunately, the bike racks predate the more energy-efficient car, hence my question.
I really want Starman to get a bike rack for the Civic, but will the lovely 40 m.p.h. we're getting now go south? Would it help if it was a removeable bike rack on the back of the car?
Inquiring (and lazy) minds want to know.
Post a Comment