In 2016, I started a new job which meant a new commute. My previous commute was a 12 minute walk which I enjoyed year-round, in any weather (rain, snow, cold, heat, etc.). I knew my new commute would be quite different but I was determined to find a way to avoid getting in my car and to include some time in nature each day.

Hence, this is where the scooter came into play. So after some research online, I bought a Razor A5 Lux in blue and began playing with it. Fortunately I had a few weeks in between jobs to test it out and pick out my ideal routes.

My commute then included a 1.7 mile scooter ride in the morning through my quiet neighborhood and then down a beautiful bike path full of wild life to where I catch the county bus to work. In the afternoon, I alternated between taking the county bus followed by that same 1.7 scooter ride from the morning or taking the coach bus to the park and ride followed by a 2.5 mile scooter ride on the sidewalk along a busier road. They both had their advantages and I liked the flexibility.

Now you may ask yourself, how much of the year could I really scooter in such a cold weather state? The answer is most of it. The cold didn't stop me. It never has. Snow covered trails would stop me though but fortunately my city plowed the bike paths, so they don't stay snow covered for long. And I don't scooter on wet pavement in the morning as the spray up turns the back of my dress a bit muddy. (In the evenings when I can go home, clean up and change, I don't mind the rain or wet pavement.)

In November of 2018, I moved to a new city, Birmingham, AL in a much warmer climate, where my commute is now 7 blocks. It is amazing to now have a 4 minute commute to work! Such a change from my one-way hour commute in Milwaukee!

Let me tell you how I came up with the name for this blog, "The Scooter Lady". I was downtown Milwaukee afterwork one day riding my scooter. (I don't even remember why I was hanging out downtown that day.) I stopped in the local mall and was carrying my scooter when someone yelled out, "hey there's the scooter lady!" When I told a colleague at work this story, he told me I needed to create a webpage for The Scooter Lady. So without further ado, read on for my experiences commuting by scooter.





Sunday, August 6, 2023

It's been a while.....

Aside from a post a couple of days ago, you may have noticed a several year gap in posts.  I just thought I would briefly catch you up to what I have been up to.

Sometime in early 2019, I let the scooter gather some dust.  My commute was only 7 blocks, hampered by a lot of uneven sidewalks that took some focus to navigate, and I wanted to slow down even further.  You notice more scootering than you do driving but you notice even more if you start walking.  I got to know the faces of the people that I saw day in and day out.  I learned the schedule of the flowering trees each February and then again in the ones that flower in the summer.  I paid closer attention to the songs of the birds and the occasional lizard scurrying into the bushes.  And since it was only a 12 minute walk, it was still short enough to come home for lunches.  

And then in 2020, it was if the world stopped with the arrival of the coronavirus.  In mid March of 2020, my employer scrambled to make sure everyone had laptops and sent us home to telework.  There were so many advantages we learned from teleworking but it didn't come without some challenges.  The first challenge was our 1 bedroom apartment where the desk where my husband worked physically touched the kitchen table where I worked.  We solved that problem by upgrading to a 2 bedroom apartment with a loft in May of 2021 in the same building.  The other challenges related to the technology we had would somewhat improve over time until we got into a good routine.  During this time, weeks and even sometimes months filled the gaps between my stops in the office which were never more than an hour or two at a time.

Then in late April 2022, over two years since we were sent home, my employer called us all back.  The scooter was still gathering dust at this point as I returned to walking back and forth to work.  My husband's work had not yet called him back so he continued to telework every day for a number of months after that.

Even before the start of the pandemic, our apartment complex had started to rotate through office staff a little too often and that just accelerated with the pandemic when they left some positions unfilled.  The building went on slow decline which for us culminated in having to spend the 2022 Christmas weekend in a hotel because our apartment temperature was in the 40s and management did very little to address what caused that.  So after the first of the year in 2023, we started the apartment hunt.  A number of brand new buildings had opened in the last couple years or were opening soon.

In March of 2023, we moved in to a new apartment in a newer building  This new place is now just about a mile away from work.  It is definitely still walkable and when my husband and I go in together, we do walk.  But the route we take includes almost half a mile through a wonderful park with a paved path plus a couple blocks of a bike lane on the street.  So there aren't as many broken sidewalks to navigate.  And those extra few blocks turned a 12 minute walk into over a 20 minute walk.  So I have dusted off the scooter and ride it to the office usually two days a week plus one evening a week to choir practice.

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