Our summer challenge!

The wait is now over for all of you who have been anxiously waiting on the edge of your seats to find out what our summer challenge is going to be!

With gas prices continuing to rise, our summer challenge will be to go carless as much as possible this summer! I spent almost $100 to fill up the tank today (yikes!) and I don't feel like doing that on a biweekly basis as we have been. $200 is just too much to spend on gas a month, especially since we live in such an accessible city.

I'm not exactly sure what this will look like. We either will try to keep our mileage under a certain amount each week, or we'll just challenge ourselves to cut our gas spending by half. We have a little bit of work to do before embarking on this challenge, like actually tracking what our mileage is each week, but here's what I do know:

I will walk with the kids to stores like CVS and Walgreens, plus the library and the 3 parks near our house.

We will totally utilize my new bike plus our Burley bike trailer and baby bike seat.

We'll try to take advantage of being home as much as possible, but not being hermits! We'll experience simple joy in playing in our backyard on the swing set, splashing in our pool, and having picnics on our backyard grass.

I'll grocery shop by biking to the store and using the bike trailer to carry our groceries home.

We will probably start attending a church close to our home that we will walk to on Sunday mornings (or Saturday evenings).

This doesn't mean we won't go anywhere far, after all we do have family and friends that live quite a distance away, but whenever we can be intentional about walking or biking someplace we will!

I'm excited about how this will necessitate a slower pace of life for us. We'll have to really take our time going places, since I don't want us to rely on our car. Additionally I think my waistline and thighs will thank me for this challenge!

Each week, I'll post how much gas we used and I'll also post at the end of the month what our total gas spending was. Whatever we don't spend on gas will go into our new car savings! Blogging our results will be the accountability I'll need to help us reach our goals.

(And if I'm feeling really brave, I'll post my waist measurements each month to see how this challenge has slimmed me down!)