Unforeseen Consequence

When I stopped going out (mid March?) I stopped driving as much.

For a good few weeks the only driving I did was to drop off or pick up something at Jason's and that's a maybe 15 minute slow drive.  At the end of March my car started sounding not so good when I started it.

And a few days after that it was really struggling to start.

Now my anxiety of course suggested that CAR WAS DYING AND GOING TO COST SO MUCH MONEY, but I've also been learning about cars over the last few years so I sat for a bit and thought.

Hmmm... my car hasn't been driven much.  So the alternator hasn't been... um... alternating... er, charging the battery.  So maybe if I take it for a drive I can see if that helps?

So I went for a little late night drive.  Probably half an hour, maybe forty minutes.  Just to a farther away part of town and back.  I felt like I was doing something illegal since we aren't really supposed to do things we don't need to and although there was no traffic I half kept expecting police to pull me over at which point I'd have to try to explain that I was trying to keep my car healthy at 11:00 at night?

Anyway, I did that short-ish drive experiment and the next time I went to start my car it sounded and felt so much happier.  So last week I drove out on the highway out towards where the ferries are (but not that far) and now my car feels a lot happier and hopefully "back to normal."

I'm going to try to remind myself to drive places to keep the car healthy and to do a longer, highway speed drive once a month at least.

But yeah, something I didn't really expect to happen with staying home and not driving... look after your cars y'all, they might be missing driving!