Making Connections

Posted by Cynical Sarah on August 23, 2006

Everyone has big events in their life that they’re proud of – learning to drive, graduating from high school, their first job, things like that. Sometimes we forget about the little accomplishments that can happen every day and make us feel just as good and confident in ourselves.

This weekend, my big, full-of-pride accomplishment was taking public transit and making three different bus connections. It doesn’t sound like much, but you have to take into consideration I’m a small-town girl from the mid-western United States where the car is king.

In Rapid City, S.D. if you want to get anywhere in the city, you pretty much have to have a car, have a very nice friend with a car, or be at the mercy of a bus system in its infancy state. Needless to say, I had a car, and I drove everywhere. I lived within blocks of Wal-mart, and I would still get in my car and drive instead of walking there.

So, giving up the car and moving to a big city with public transportation was a big adjustment for me. Learning the SkyTrain was pretty easy. It’s pretty much just one big loop and most everything I need is right along my side of the loop anyway. One of the stations is even within walking distance.

One things that I’ve managed to avoid doing to much though is taking the bus. Buses are a lot harder to work with sometimes. If you miss a train, at leas you know in a few minutes another one will be coming along. With a bus, depending on its schedule and route, it could be minutes, it could be half an hour, who know.

That means you have to be much more precise with your planning when you take the bus – and honestly, I’m not very good with precision planning. Don’t tell my husband I’m admitting this, but I tend to run late. Not just because I take to long getting ready for things, but also because I have a “why are we hurrying?” attitude. If I miss a train, I can just shrug it off. But if I miss a train, which means I’ll probably be missing a bus I was supposed to catch, that’s not as easy to shrug off, and pretty much impossible to shrug off if the hubby is with me because he’s a bigger stickler about making those connections.

So this weekend, I had to go pick up my wedding dress from the seamstress and I had two choices of how to get there by public transit: I could take the train and catch a bus that goes within blocks of her house but also takes about an hour total for the trip, or I could take the bus right down the street, connect to another bus, and then connect to another bus and be there in half the time and end up just as close.

The bus schedule fearing part of me was leaning toward the SkyTrain and one bus route, but I didn’t want to waste an hour of my Saturday evening on transit. I sucked it up and decided to take the bus. I could have given myself a little leeway and gone a little early to make sure that if I did miss a connection I’d still at least get there at a decent time, but I must have been in a mood to torture myself.

I wrote down the bus numbers and where I had to get off on each to connect to the other, and I headed out with exactly enough time to catch the first bus and make all the connections to get to my final destination at the time I was supposed to be there. My first bus ended up being a couple minutes behind schedule, but I didn’t panic – not yet.

It was on the first bus though that I made a rookie mistake. I pulled the cord a little early, so I was about two blocks short of where I wanted to get off and make my connecting bus. I could see the bus stop from here, and there was already a bus there picking people up … and of course pulling away before I was anywhere near it. My heart sank a little as I realized I hadn’t thought to check how often each bus ran in case I missed one.

I’m not sure if I got lucky or if I was supposed to have a bit of a wait at that stop, though, because it wasn’t long after I got there that my bus pulled up and away I went again anyway. Now I just had to make sure I didn’t miss the stop I had to get off at next. I’ve made that mistake before too. I once somehow missed a stop and ended up at least a dozen blocks past where I needed to be.

Fortunately the rest of the trip was uneventful. I made my stop, caught the third bus, didn’t miss my last stop, and I was at the seamstress’ house right on time. When I got off the third bus though, I realized that was the first time I’d made a trip like that solely by bus. Sure, I’ve taken the bus up the street to the grocery store or the mall before, but that’s just one bus. This was three different busses, perfectly timed, and a trip excellently executed.

I was having a small-town girl making it in the big city moment all because I’d made a couple bus connections.

- Sarah L. Polson

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