As Far As I Can Tell

Last week we were in Chicago to find an apartment and ended up with a great duplex near Damen and Division in Wicker Park. It’s the second and third floor of a coach house with two bathrooms and four (!) entryways. We looked at lots of places but most seemed like college crash pads, trashed by the previous tenets with liquor bottles and filth everywhere. Finally, the second to last place on our list was an apartment we could picture ourselves living in.

We also bought a new car, a first for me since I’ve had pick-up trucks since I was 15. Our reasons for switching included wanting to haul friends more than stuff, easy parking, and fuel efficiency. The last one was a key point for us not only on economic terms ($3.90/g for gas in Chicago) but for our environmental conscious. The only car that made sense was the Prius and luckily it’s not only the most fuel efficient car in America but has some fun ways of interacting with it as well. The key is RFID-based so you can keep it in your pocket and just press a button to start the car, the doors unlock automatically for you, it has Bluetooth integration so we can make phone calls hands free from our cell phones, and a touch screen handles all car controls so the dash isn’t cluttered.

The core feature of the car, the hybrid engine system, is even more impressive than I expected. We drove from Chicago to Pittsburgh, nearly 500 miles, on a single tank of gas. It shows you what MPG the car is achieving in real time as you drive so you can begin to learn how to drive in the most fuel efficient way. That gauge is a key part of the Prius innovation since it begins to teach behavior change instead of just acting as a technological cure-all.

I really love this car; you can see more photos on Flickr.