Last night was the Seattle Mac User Group meeting, dBug, here in Seattle. My wife is a member and had asked me to attend with her. Being that she was already in Seattle, I had to get there and we all know I don’t really like to drive if I can help it, at least not far.
I decided to take a grand adventure and take the Seattle Metro bus system to meet her then ride back with her after the meeting. It really was quite a fun evening so I thought I would share a little bit about the entire experience.
I used the fancy dancy Seattle Metro Trip Planner to find out exactly what buses and times I would take and was prepared with a nice printed page of three travel itinerary options.
If 100 > 90, Run Fast
I took off at 4:20 for the 4:38 bus at 124th and 100th with my Zune jamming some music, Camera in hand for any photos I decided to take, and my backpack full of goodies to keep me busy until I should arrive at Westpark Center at 6:00.
When I arrived where I “thought” 100th street was, I realized it was 90th. I had 8 minutes to make it to 100th so I hauled ass and got there with two minutes to spare, the MT 320 bus was a whopping one minute late, not too bad.
I boarded the bus, flashed my FlexPass that Microsoft so nicely provides me for free public transit, and I was on my way. The first leg was about 20 minutes long, putting me at the Terminal near the bridge to Seattle with about 20 minutes to wait for the MT 256 Bus.
My grand master plan was to pull out my handy MSI Wind, tether it to my cell phone and chit chat with Dawn while I made my way to Seattle. My plan was thwarted when I realized I had 30% battery life and had no USB cable to even let the laptop power the phone. That is not like me! When I returned home for the evening I made sure everything that was supposed to be in my bag was put in and everything was charged. Bad Jason!
Crossing The Bridge
With little use for my laptops without internet, I pulled out my trusty Zune and queued up the Live from London episode of Diggnation. People watching I noticed that the busses are not only clean but there is a pretty good mix of people on them. It’s a safe feeling bus and there are so many gadgets about you don’t feel self conscious advertising that you carry a small Best Buy in your backpack (Doesn’t everyone?)
A few times I had to ask people on the bus what the stops were because other than being very quiet, the bus drivers calls the stops out in the fastest possible verbiage you can imagine. I don’t think I understood what either of the drivers I rode with said once.
When I arrived at Westpark center, and made my way to street level, I quickly realized I had no clue where I was or which direction to go to find the streetcar pickup. It was only 0.1 mile away according to my directions, but nowhere does it say which direction! You might want to try and square that away before you go because it could be troublesome.
I reached back into my goodie bag and pulled out my handheld GPS to figure out exactly where I was. I was a good several miles from Dawn still, so I popped out my phone, called her and gave her my intersection and she headed out to pick me up on her way to the meeting.
I didn’t finish the last route of the ride, but I am glad it worked out like it did, we had just enough time to grab a little food before the meeting started.
Macs and Adobe
The meeting was actually quite well attended. On hand were two engineers from Adobe to show off the cool new features of Adobe CS4 Production. Checking out the new features and integration of Premiere Pro, Soundtrack, After Effects, Encore and Media Encoder was impressive. I got a fancy Adobe CS T-shirt to add to my black T-shirt collection for my time. Unfortunately we did not win the copy of CS4 being raffled off, Dawn was quite sad about that!
All in all it was a fun evening, great demos, the bus ride was actually fun and it left me with a great deal of confidence to take the bus system when we want to go downtown instead of driving and parking and dealing with keeping up with a car.
If you have avoided the metro system, I recommend it, it wasn’t crowded or dirty and the entire trip was a pleasure.
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I have been riding the metro to work from out in the burbs on the east side for nearly a year (when I moved to this region) and have never seen any problems on the buses. I agree that the drivers need to learn to speak louder and clearer. My only complaint is that a number of riders seem to think that we must all listen to what is blasting out of their earbuds. These rude individuals are not young either. They are sure to destroy their ears and cost all of us much in the way of Health Insurance dollars when they need hearing aids. I also bet that a large number of individuals that i ride the bus with are probably pulling close to six figure (or at least live like they are) salaries since i see what cars they get into at the park and ride.
Wow this looks like a lot of fun! The metro in the burbs is such an adventure.