Zipcar for the holidays

Visiting family over the holidays is very important for us, and has proven to be one of the main difficulties of not having a car.  Originally, when planning our car-free adventure/life, we'd calculated spending a certain amount on car rentals for trips to Connecticut to visit family--usually we can rent a car for $30-$40/day from the airport over a weekend.  However, as we discovered at Thanksgiving, car rental companies will triple their daily rate over holiday weekends.  So our little three day trip at Thanksgiving cost more than $350 just for rental, plus we had to pay for gas.  It was worth it, but more than we'd expected (by a lot).

Over Christmas, we made another three-day trip to CT, but this time we used Zipcar.  It turns out that you can rent a Zipcar for a maximum of four days.  The daily rate does not change over the holidays.  We rented a Honda Element for $89/day, which is a little less than what we'd have paid from Thrifty or the other big car rental agencies, but all the taxes and gas were included, so we came out about $100 ahead.  And I didn't have to schlep myself over the the airport and back.  Over Thanksgiving, it took me 90 minutes just to pick up the car.  With Zipcar, I just needed to walk 5-10 minutes from home.

There are some cheaper car rental places around, very small companies, but the online reviews of them are pretty scary.  If anyone in the Boston area knows of reputable ones, I'd be interested in hearing about them.  For now, though, it looks like Zipcar will help us out over the holidays.

Got to Drive a Truck (still loving Zipcar)

Yesterday, we rented a pickup truck from Zipcar to transport three bales of salt marsh hay over to our community garden plot. I LOVE that Zipcar has pickup trucks available. I was able to reserve this one with just one hour's notice. In two hours, Noah and I got bought the hay, laid it out in the garden, and returned the truck. (I think the cost was about $25 for the truck.) It was a Toyota Tacoma--it fit the bales perfectly, and it reminded me how much fun it is to drive a pickup. (Not that I want to own one.) It'd also be the perfect tool for an IKEA trip (hmm)--in fact there was even an IKEA shopping list left behind from a previous driver.

Having Zipcar around is really making the whole car free thing a LOT easier.

Zipcar rocks

(by Pat)

Had my first real Zipcar experience yesterday. We rented a Honda Civic Hybrid for 8 hours (so about $56), from 1pm - 9pm. We needed to pick up our son from the beach (where he'd been hanging out with big sister and Grandma) in Rhode Island, but first we figured we should use the car to get some heavy items--dog food, kitty litter, and potting soil, and then we needed to drop off a friend at a garage in Natick where his car was being repaired. Initially, we weren't sure we'd need the whole 8 hours, but with rain, traffic, and a little bit of time spent being lost (my fault), we got home with just half an hour to spare.

Zipcar rocks. It was easy to use the card to unlock the car. The garage pass was where it was supposed to be. We even needed to fill up with gas, and the gas card was there, ready to go. Very simple.

We did a lot of driving over the past week, it seems, but we also walked and biked many, many miles, all over Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge. Today, we biked to the movies and also for grocery shopping. Feels great.