Milestones with Modo

Way back in 2003, I decided to join The Cooperative Auto Network (I'll just refer to it as Modo from here on in because it's just easier). They had almost a hundred cars I could use, including these adorable rounded little Volkswagen Beetles, with the flower holders even! I'd never owned a car back then & it was so exciting to be able to just book one & drive wherever, whenever. I felt very adult.

Getting Hitched With Modo

Later that fall, Oliver & I got married. We drove the scenic Sea to Sky Highway to the Stawamus Chief with our offiant, & two photographer/witness/friends squeezed into the back of a little blue Modo Beetle. All five of us hiked to the top of Third Peak where we said our vows & had a picnic. We took the same vehicle, adorned with window chalk, on our honeymoon in the Gulf Islands.

Moving House With Modo

We really do believe in the cooperative model. Besides being car coop members, we lived in a housing cooperative & did our day to day banking with a credit union. Eventually we decided to buy a place to live & of course, when we moved from our housing coop into the condo in 2006, we used Modo trucks & vans to pick up the tools & supplies to redo the flooring the bedrooms. Then we used Modo vehicles to move our belongings in many batches to the new place.

When we bought our house a couple of years later, we had accumulated a bit more stuff & decided a moving truck on one day was the way to go. We were still using Modo for Costco trips, many, many trips to various home improvement stores, picking up large quantities of compost from the city yard to start our new garden. Having all ypes of different vehicles at our disposal has always been a huge benefit of Modo. When we need to move some trees or pick up lumber, if we don't do it by bike (serioiusly, I've hauled lumber on my cargo bike) we can use a Modo pickup truck or a van.

Having Babies With Modo

Classic story, right? Marriage, then picket fence, then babies! But how do you get to the hospital when you're in labour if you don't own a car? I've heard that taxi drivers don't always want to bring a woman in labour to the hospital--liability issues, I guess?--& transit or biking was right out of the question.

A Modo vehicle brought us to BC Women's hospital early one August morning of 2010 when I was in labour with Linnaeus. Almost exactly three years later, we booked a car to get me to Women's for Bronte on a September afternoon after 35 hours of on-again-off-again labour. Both children had their very first car ride home from the hospital in Modo cars.

By the way, using a Modo car is a great way to avoid the very expensive cost of parking at the hospital. Modo cars are all eligible to park in permit zones around the city, which includes the streets all around the hospital.

Modo has also been there for us for some of our less happy moments, like when we needed to get Linnny to Children's Emergency with breathing difficulties. He had croup, we found out at the hospital, which was quickly treated & we were sent home almost immediately. The whole trip from when we picked up the car, took Linny to Children's, brought him back home again, & returned the car, was ONE HOUR. The booking was started at 11pm, so there was no time charge, only a few dollars for the kilometres. The trip cost us much less than two taxi trips would have, comparable to bus fare.

Introducing... 

The latest milestone with Modo is becoming a Modo Blogger Ambassador! Modo will be providing me with some driving credits & I'll be blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, & Instagramming about our adventures big & small with Modo. I've already been writing about carsharing for years, so if you've been following me for a while, expect more of the same! To follow my Modo travels, & the other Modo Blogger Ambassadors (there are a few of us!) click on the hashtags #LetsModo & #MyModo & follow @Modo_CarCoop on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

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