Mass Transit Success!

Yesterday, I'm proud to announce, I discovered an express bus route that takes me to and from work in a reasonably efficient manner. I have to walk a fair amount (up first hill, augh!) but I figure the walking is good for me (right?).

Actually, my morning bus ride experience might make you chuckle. So, the bus stop where I am to be picked up is only three blocks from my house - a super easy commute. As I rounded the corner to walk the last block, I saw my bus pulling up to the curb. I immediately broke out into a sprint in an effort to catch the bus (duh). Unfortunately, to catch the bus, I had to cross two intersections (the stop was kitty-corner from me) and by the time I had dodged pedestrians and traffic alike, the bus was zooming away from me. Rats!

Now, if you've ever frequented a mass transist system, you know that the tricky thing about being new to any given route is knowing which side of the street (or tracks) to stand on. You could be in the right place at the right time and still end up going the wrong direction (which I've totally done before and when you get off after one stop, makes you feel pretty sheepish. Whatever, I'm over it.) So being the seasoned veteran that I am, I breathlessly checked the bus schedule on that side of the street and discovered, yay!, that bus was actually not my bus. then I commenced to make the "walk of shame" as I crossed the street again and inserted myself into the gaggle of people I had just sprinted through to run after ,what turned out to be, not my bus. Talk about feeling sheepish...heh heh...ah, yeah. (Insert gentle let-down, semi-awkward sigh here.)

As I got on the bus though, all was forgotten as I was stopped short when I took a seat next to Bullet-Tooth Tony*. No joke, I had to try and not stare. They guy really looked like him! (Although later that same day, I thought the Fed-Ex guy looked kind of shy-yet-adorable a la Bill Pullman, so perhaps it was just a faux celebrity sighting kind of day.)

*It's from the movie Snatch. If you don't know it...well, just forget I brought it up.

Not Gonna Do It.

Ya know, I heard the other day that gas prices are going to reach over $5/gal in July. And I thought to myself, this is truly getting ridiculous. I refuse. Nope, not gonna do it. I'd rather protest instead.

(...Wait for it...wait for it...)

Okay, so I'm not really protesting like with picket signs down at the federal building with bags of rotten tomatoes (who'd I throw them at anyway?) or nagging people to sign petitions or anything like that. But I am going to do myself a favor and make a change.

The whole thing really came about by accident. I had decided to ride my bike to work one day last week (despite the fact that I have to ride 4 miles out of my way to use a shower - 2 miles to the gym and 2 back...*sigh*) in an effort to a) not only get my flabby butt up and moving more than twice a week and b) to at least put a dent in the spending I've recently been doing on gas.

However, after I'd turned in my 9 mile "pre-work" workout, I arrived to discover that my co-worker (who is also a group fitness instructor at the same gym) was out sick. That meant I'd have to cover her cycle class. No wait - ride 2 miles back to the gym, cover her cycle class, then ride 7 miles home. That's 20 miles in a day! Certainly not impossible, but when you've only been cycling once a week....yikes.

This is when I replayed in my head a conversation I'd had with my beautiful best friend Andi used-to-be-Lopez in which she suggested I check out the bus schedule. Since the addition of the Go Lines all over town, there have been all kinds of new routes. Brilliant!

I immediately dove into the Whatcom Transit Authority's website and an hour later I realized, I can take the bus! (God bless public transit.) In fact, with all the new updates, I found that I could easily take the bus every day. Instead of biking to work (which was, despite a good workout, a huge pain) I just bike to the downtown station. Heck yeah man! No 20 miles for me!

So I promptly bought a bus pass ($20 per month - so cheap!) and I haven't driven my car to work since. With a fill-up costing me ~$50 every 3 weeks, at this point, you'd have to pay me to start my car Monday - Friday. So yeah, I'm not gonna do it.

(Seriously though, I'm really excited about my bus pass - it's pretty frickin' awesome.)