We've Gone Green

Little by little our family has been trying to be nicer to our planet. We started growing our own vegetables and fruits two years ago. We expanded the second year and have already expanded more going into our third year of "small farming" We are even going to add chickens and a chicken coop to our "farm" this spring! I am excited to have fresh eggs and know exactly where they came from and how the chickens are fed and raised. Our family makes a conscious effort to recycle and reuse as much as we can by utilizing the local recycling program, creating a compost area in our backyard, shopping with reusable bags and so much more. We aren't what you would consider "tree huggers," but we are environmentally conscious.

That being said, we are continually looking for ways to improve and reduce our carbon footprint. It doesn't hurt if we save a little money in some way by doing it, infact, that is a bonus in many cases in addition to the peace of mind in what we eat, how we live and what we are teaching our children. So in the midst of all of this constant improvement, how do you reduce your carbon footprint when you have a person in the house who has a daily commute of 57.2 miles 5 days a week when said person drives the minivan that is used to haul the family of four and all their "stuff?" It gets quite expensive when pulling in to the gas pump in the family minivan, that is for sure! It was a blessing to finally get a new co-worker this year that I could commute with everyday. That helped to cut the driving down significantly and was saving us money as well. So, the carbon footprint that we were creating was cut down, right? Well, if you consider that on the days I wasn't driving all the way to work in my minivan, I was still riding in a car that was putting carbon into the air, my footprint didn't really get all that much smaller. What is a family to do when we are saving money, but still not doing it in an environmentally friendly way?

The answer to our question was the Nissan Leaf! My husband poured over blogs, research, articles, statistics. He created spreadsheets, attended a special event to drive the Leaf in Philadelphia, continued to work on his spreadsheets and look for more research and data. You can certainly say he did his homework. He got me on board after continual problems with our van resulting in numerous trips to garages, and much money being put into it. Although, I still don't understand all of his numbers and charts and graphs. We discussed it all, thought about it, and in December, 2011 the Nissan company opened up Tier 4 states to ordering their Leaf model. That meant that we could actually place an order for the vehicle in our state of Delaware!

Our car was ordered during the last week of December, 2011. Originally the date we were given for delivery was about 2 months after initial ordering. Much to our surprise, only a few days later, an email came that said our car would be delivered the week of January 23rd. A few days after that our delivery date changed to January 20. Again, an email came two days after that one that stated our deliversy date would be January 18th. We couldn't believe that it was happening so fast! On January 12 I came home to find a message on our voicemail from the Nissan dealer who took delivery of the car we'd ordered. Our Nissan Leaf had been delivered that day and we could go pick it up as early as Friday, January 13th! We weren't quite ready to go pick up the car just then. We had to get our game plan set and practice our negotiation faces.

On Monday, January 16th, after much negotiations (on the dealer's part, which will be the subject of a future post) we brought our brand new, 2012 Nissan Leaf home. We were officially "green" with our driving! It was exciting to think that we own a car that will no longer require us to make weekly trips to a gas pump. A car that has no tailpipe.

Driving this Nissan Leaf is sure to be a journey with many lessons to learn and also lessons to teach. If you are interested in finding out more about the Leaf or my journey, or both, feel free to follow me here. I'll be on the road, driving Miss Evie.