I’ve braved the rain, snow and many a windy day on my bicycle. I’ve towed trailers, filled my panniers, and fixed my flats. This afternoon, I toted books to the library and went to the hardware store, and finally–went and purchased a 1-1/2 gallons of gasoline at a Chevron while on my bicycle. The gas can was bungeed to the back of my bicycle the whole time.

It was a very strange feeling! Almost a moral dilemma–does one really want to admit, and be so public about carrying gasoline on a human-powered vehicle? Well, how is driving a car to buy gasoline any better than riding a bicycle for the same purpose?

Five bucks–fillerup! Five bucks won’t even fill a 2 gallon vessel. So my cargo wasn’t brimming. However, by the time I got home–it may as well have. The gas seeped through the threads of the cap a down the front of the plastic gas can, puddling on the top of my saddle-bag rack and sloshing onto one of my nylon panniers carrying my library books. Luckily, nothing inside was damaged.

I was bitter! I was disappointed! I was not happy. I needed to calm down. Now I couldn’t take my saddle bag inside and I needed to scrub down my bicycle and the saddle bag. I unloaded, put the cargo inside, grabbed the bottle of dish soap and a scrub brush and plopped the saddle bag next to the garden hose and started scrubbing.

I’ve considered owning an electric mower in the past, and I do have a push mower. But when the lawn has got to get done quickly–because that’s often not quick enough given how little time I already seem to have–well–my gas mower is pretty handy.

But it’s been an amazing year: I’ve fixed most of my bike problems myself. Flat tires, broken chains, wrong seat heights, started using full tire pressure, how to true a wheel, adjust brakes, correct front and rear dérailleurs, adjusting chain length, changed a front fork, and used studded tires! A few years of knee pain before and now I’ve done 1000 miles without knee pain, and I’ve even successfully recovered from rear-leg pain (from too high a seat). I’ve done a 12 mile route to a six mile commute and was hardly winded.

So what’s a little gasoline now and then? I shouldn’t feel too guilty, really.