Our five-month car experiment: a retrospective

Our goal for this summer was to get out of the city and into nature more often. We thought that a car might help us with that, but we weren’t sure. To find out, we rented a car for about five months. A couple of weeks ago we returned the car, thereby concluding our little experiment. Here’s what we learned: The good: Long road trips: the car enabled us to travel for over a month, driving all the way from Berlin down to the Alps and back again in a big circle, giving us several days in each of a dozen locations. Without a car, such a trip would have been very difficult at best. New places: Berlin is surrounded by beautiful places (e.g. serene lakes), many of which are difficult to reach with public transport. The car helped us get to some of them for the first time. Traveling on our own schedule: public transport is fairly rigid when it comes to timetables. Once you’ve booked seats for a particular train, you’d better catch it. Getting the kids ready in time isn’t always easy, though.…