Along the way, I passed the home of a neighbor who was standing beside a Chevy Caprice in his snow-covered driveway with a rubber mallet in one hand and a chisel in the other. I could see that he was trying to get into the driver's side door of his car, which had been iced over by the cold and the wet storm of the night before. The snow was about a foot deep, but the road had been nicely plowed.
He looked over at me, and I could see by the annoyed look on his face that he was probably thinking: Look at that poor SOB. Doesn't even own a car. About a half hour later, I was heading back to the comfort of my warm home with my mail, a few groceries, and my deposit slip from the bank, when I passed his home again
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Poor SOB, indeed. But not me.
I moved to Maine from Arizona after retiring about six years ago. Some people who live here said: "What the heck's wrong with you? Don't you know it's supposed to be the other way around?"
But I like it this way around. I like the change of the seasons, and the season I like the best is winter.
People again think I'm crazy. But listen to the most common complaints about winter: "I had to shovel 50 feet just to get out of my (bleep) driveway!" "My car wouldn't start because the temperature is below (bleep) zero!" "As soon as I got out to Route 1, I slid into a (bleep) ditch?" "I can't even open the (bleep) door: It's frozen shut!"
What do all these complaints have in common? The car.
If you can somehow do without the car, winter in Maine can be like a Currier & Ives print. I decided when I retired that, for reasons of health and economy, I would try to give up car ownership. Since I had owned cars all my life, I did not think I would be able to do it. But guess what? It has been easier than I ever thought. I just walk or bicycle wherever I want to go. If it is too far to walk, such as Belfast, six miles away, I can usually arrange for a $2 ride through Waldo Transportation. Also, I had my Arizona license changed to a Maine license so that once a month I can rent a car, do a little shopping at the mall in Bangor, and take my wife, Neva, out to dinner.
True, if you live a long way out of town and have to drive a long way to work every day, you cannot do without your car. But if you do not fall into that category, let's do the math:
Let's say you are still paying for the car. An average of $200 a month or $2,400 a year. Let's say repairs and parts only amount to $500 a year. Let's say your insurance is $600 a year. Let's say registration is $100. And then we come to gas. Let's say you drive an average of 40 miles a day going to and from work and running errands, and your car gets 20 miles to the gallon. That's only two gallons -- times $3 a gallon -- times 364 days (you stay home for Christmas) or $2,184 a year-just for gas. Add all that up, and it comes to $5,784.
While you're adding it up, I'm thinking about spending 10 days during Christmas visiting and shopping in my favorite city in the world (after Bangor, of course), Paris -- the most romantic city in the world, the City of Light -- with my beautiful wife.
Since it's the off-season, I can get two tickets round-trip, American Airlines, from Boston to Paris for about $700. Again, since it's the off-season, I can get rooms in a lovely three-star hotel, the Residence Ste. Honore, only two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe and with a view from the window of the Eiffel Tower -- lighted up at night -- for about $130, breakfast included. That's $1,300.
Usually, we like to combine lunch and dinner into one excellent meal and figure on spending $100 for the two of us -- which, by the way, will go a long way at the excellent-but-not-famous Café Mozart on Avenue Mozart. That's $1,000. Finally, let's say $50 a day for incidentals, such as a glass of wine in the English Bar at the Plaza Atheneé (Elizabeth Taylor usually stays there), or perhaps a sightseeing ride down the Seine in a Bateux Mouche, or perhaps a little Christmas shopping at the Galeries Lafayette. So that's another $500 or, roughly, a total of $3,500. That's a long way from your nearly $6,000 for the dubious right of owning a car.
Have we done this every year? No, but we've done it a couple of times, thanks to not having a car, and we could do it every year if we wanted to.
At one time, my wife asked uncertainly: "Are you sure we shouldn't have a car?"
"I'm sure," I replied. "And we'll always have Paris."
A former travel writer, Stephen Allen is probably the only person in Searsport who has been to Paris 27 times
