From The Highway - Summer Edition

My wife's flight from Champaign to Dallas was delayed 3 hours due to thunderstorms at DFW. That meant that she would miss her connection in Dallas by more than an hour and then miss her 8:00 meeting this morning. It was early afternoon at this point, and only way for her to get to her destination by 8:00 am was to drive to Indy and then fly from there. But since her flight home this evening is to Champaign, she couldn't really leave a car at the Indianapolis airport. The solution: her husband drives her the 1 hour and 49 minutes from Champaign to the Indy airport.

I really don't mind doing that. We've been a one car household since the move to Champaign so we've had to do this occasionally. I should maybe tell the story on that (and then I promise to publish the podcast that I recorded while driving home).

In St. Louis, for our last six years there, I had a work vehicle. When I quit my job to move to Champaign, obviously, I had to return my work vehicle. We planned to purchase a second vehicle once we got to Champaign.

We moved to Champaign on April 4, 2020... in the middle of the very first Covid lockdown. I still remember driving to get coffee one of the first mornings here (moving tip: pack the coffeemaker somewhere you can find it) and finding that the streets were completely empty. That was that two-week "everything closed except for essential services" period, so there were no cars on the roads.

The next few months were very similar. My wife worked from home with very little to do. I didn't have any sports to cover. And as a result, we saw absolutely no need for a second vehicle. We'd wait until summer to buy another car.

And then it got to the fall and we still didn't need a vehicle, especially with Covid still restricting everything. I rent cars for road trips (or take the train, or fly) so there were, like, three instances those first six months where we both needed the car at the same time. We rode that out for a long time saying things like "we'll eventually need a second car so we'll do that next spring" but then we found that we didn't really need a second car.

When she switched jobs a few years after moving here, taking a travel position, we really didn't need a second car because her travel switched to airplanes instead of cars. So here we are in 2025, more than five years later, having both needed to drive somewhere at the same time maybe... a dozen times? You don't need a second car for a dozen drives in five years. Put me down for Team "Empty Nesters Don't Need Two Cars If There's No Commuting Involved."

None of that has anything to do with yesterday, of course. Even if we had two cars, she couldn't have left one in Indy because tonight's return flight is to Willard. So I simply stopped the Slapdash I was writing yesterday, hopped in the car, and drove her to Indianapolis.

And, on the way home, I asked for questions on Twitter and Slack and then recorded this (Apple here, Spotify here):