Observation: Random passersby yell "Hey, baby!" for longer periods of time when my hair is blowing free than when it is caught up in a ponytail. But that's not what this entry is about.
This entry is about my remarkably efficient planning. Today I had planned to go deal with
the forces of darkness some bits of bureaucracy in a place where bus service is less than optimal. Before I left the house, I looked at Metro's
web site and wrote down the details of each bus route which could possibly get me from point A to point B within an almost-but-not-quite-reasonable length of time. So I got myself to point A and proceeded to wait for a bit, happily enjoying the sunshine and non-oppressive warmth of the day. As I was waiting for the first bus I was expecting, I unexpectedly spotted another bus on my list. After double-checking that the bus route number and the destination were correct, I cheerily boarded the bus.
And then I looked at my list again and realized that while, yes, I did board a bus with the right destination and number, I did not board a bus run by the right system. I'd gotten myself confused and boarded a county bus rather than a Metrobus.
Well, by this point it was too late to go back and catch the
other county bus I had originally planned to take, so I decided to stay on
this county bus in the hopes that, since the route ran from point A to point C, it might also pass by point B as well. Point B, in this case, is a high school situated on a major road some fraction of a mile from my planned destination. I rode the bus for a bit and then the bus turned onto a different road. Before it left the major road, however, I saw what appeared to be a high school up ahead, so I got off at the next bus stop and proceeded to walk back to the school.
If you guessed that the high school in question was an entirely different school from the high school I had hoped it would be, give yourself a cookie.
Fortunately, today was a beautiful day and I was feeling reasonably energetic, so I decided to take a walk in the hopes of eventually getting to where I wanted to be. Although I would not normally choose to walk so far alongside a road with so much traffic, the walk was enjoyable enough, with greenery sprouting up in all sorts of interesting places along the way. After a while I even started seeing signs indicating that I was walking along the route followed by the Metrobus route whose number was the same as the number of the county bus I had gotten on, so I felt confident that I was walking in the right direction.
As I waited for the light to change at an intersection by a shopping center, someone walking up to me on my right caught my attention. It was
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aekiy! After we expressed our mutual surprise at finding each other there, we walked back to his car and he kindly drove me to the government office I wanted to go to. Hooray!
An hour after boarding the wrong bus, I arrived at my intended destination--a mere ten minutes later than I would have gotten there if I'd boarded the right bus in the first place.
I spent an hour in the office, sometimes talking to people who worked there and sometimes sitting back and listening to happy toddlers teaching each other the proper way to touch their toes. After being told that I'd hear something or other within a week or two, I went outside, waited for whichever bus might happen to decide to come by the place, and then boarded the county bus I had originally intended to take a couple hours before. Stopped by a grocery store on the way home in order to get some fruit and Gatorade, came home, and collapsed for a few hours.
So, what adventures did you have today?
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