Some years ago my family and I moved out of Copenhagen, away from our appartment and into our house. While it was great to get the extra space and not having to sleep in the livingroom, it did introduce a new element into our lives, which I just a few years previously would have forsworn would ever happen: we had become pendlers.
Until we moved I had always used my bikecycle to get to and from work, even when I had just over 20 km – a shower after each trip was required. Living in the city we also very seldom used our car. In fact we did not get one until our second son was almost a year old; now we have two cars and as I wrote in a previous post drive all over the place.
How do I get to work? Having 80 km to Copenhagen kind of rules out the cycling to work business. Initially I took the train, which was nice (when it was on time or ran at all) as it allowed you to actually use you time for something usefull: work, read, sleep, make love – yeah, you wish ;). At the moment I’m taking my car – properly not very PC these days, but public transportation to my current destination is just not practical.
The driving is actually not that bad. I leave early and hence avoid most of the rush hour traffic on Køge Bugt (a notorious stretch of freeway south of the capital). I’ve just had the handfree Parrot MKi9200 system installed in my car, which apart from allowing me to answer phone calls without breaking the law, also allows me to listen to my own choice of music and more importantly podcasts and audio books.
In an ideal world you would live next to your workplace, like my good friend Han Sen, who is able to walk to work in around 5 minutes, and at the same time you would have an ample amount of space at your disposal. In the real world, this is not always possible. We selected the space and fresh air over proximity and have never looked back. Sure my wife and I may well move back to the city once the children “have left the nest”, but that is another story.
Hey Little Angel by Éric Serra