Life Without a Vehicle

As I explained in my original post, this blog is about my experiences of living without a vehicle. When I embarked on this phase of my life, I had some pre-conceived notions of what it would be like, but I truly did not know for sure if it would be possible. I had some doubts, and so did some of my friends and family. Nobody lives in Upstate New York without a car, that's just crazy talk. I was sure there would be some hassles or inconveniences along the way, but I thought I could make it work well enough. What I wasn't expecting it to be was a bit of a life-changing experience.

Slick's Tavern & Restaurant

Before I get into more detail about my life experiment, I want to let you know about one of the places that primarily drew me to Schenectady's Stockade neighborhood as a place to live. 

I grew up in the Corning-Painted Post area of Upstate New York, and I have fond memories of many of the restaurants, taverns and pubs that were a big part of the daily life of that industrial area. Corning in particular had an abundance of corner and neighborhood bars and taverns, the kind that were always full of life, loud people and good food. I was, of course, very young then, but I often went to these places with my (much) older brothers, often after a little league game or practice, where I got to sit at the bar with one of them, or in a group of their friends at a table, and have a soda and a burger, or a basket of the now-ubiquitous Buffalo chicken wings. Because of the Flood of '72 (Hurricane Agnes), a good many of those places are gone. Those were different times back then, but the memories of the laughter and jokes, the crusty old bartenders ("Hey kid, how are ya? Nice game last night. Coke's on me"), and the feeling of belonging to a place, always were very strong in my mind. I found some of those places when I was a college student in Binghamton (which might explain why I didn't do a lot of dating then; no self-respecting girl would set foot in most of those places).