Katie's First Mass...

Transit Bus Ride, that is.

This morning when it was snowing pretty heavily, I suggested to Katie that we should go to the mall to finish up our shopping and instead of driving in the snow, we should take the bus. Well, she was so excited about that and I was her hero for even suggesting it. I actually don't know why I was comfortable suggesting such a thing since I've never in my life taken a mass transit bus before. Shuttle bus, yes ~ subway train, yes ~ taxi cabs, sure ~ but mass transit busses scare me. Once I saw Katie's excitement, I knew I had to set aside my fear and figure it out or suffer the consequences. So, I went online and Portland's mass transit system, TriMet, has quite an easy-to-understand web site, allowing even ME to figure out how to get from here to there. Fortunately, all we had to do was get on one bus and it wasn't necessary to transfer along the way.

We walked only a few minutes down the street and waited maybe 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Katie and Regina got on first and I followed behind to pay our fares. I overpaid, not knowing that Katie was free! Oh well. So we all sat down and for about 10-15 minutes, we enjoyed the ride. It was nice to just sit back and relax, while someone else worried about maneuvering the snow and ice on the roads. Next thing I know, we're sliding down an incline, slipping sideways onto a divider in the middle of the road, which actually prevented us from going further and eventually over a hillside. The driver was able to stop the bus before we entered crossing traffic and none of us were hurt. We did, however, have to wait there for about an hour for help to arrive to take care of the bus and another bus to pick us up and take us the rest of the way. I'm happy to say we did make it to the mall, without further incident. We shopped for a couple of hours and made it home before dark, which was our goal.