Meidy Thoughts

Londoners are generally not fans of their public transport. I really didn't agree with them until yesterday. In the six months that I have been here, I have really only had a few days where traveling to work or around town has been made difficult by the public transport not working properly. I have been late to work a few mornings and weekend engineering works are a pain when they are scheduled around where you live. But yesterday, on a morning that I really needed to be at work on time because of a meeting I had that I needed to prepare for, things went bad....really bad. Here is my story.

I live right on the train tracks of the District Line. I could hear the trains not running well while I was getting ready in the morning. So I took off to the next nearest station, which is only about a six minute walk (thank goodness the weather was on my side that morning!). As I was approaching the station, I could see that it was closed...CLOSED! What?? I was so confused because there was no explanation why it was closed. I now had to make the decision to either walk back to my tube station or proceed to the next station, which was another 10 minute walk. I at least knew my station was open, but knew things weren't going well. So, I decided to walk on.

When I got to the next station, there was a sign. It read "Tube down, take bus". Nothing else. Nothing on which tubes lines were down, if they were completely down or just not working between a few stations....nothing! I had never had to take the bus to work before and knew that someone had been looking out for me because two months ago, I had never even been on a bus in London. Over the last two months I have become very confident in my ability to get to where I need to go on the bus (if you have never been to London, you won't understand how complicated the system is!). I proceeded to the bus stop with my trusty bus spider maps in hand and mapped out where I would need to change to another bus in order to get to work....mind you, I am NOT familiar with the roads at all here and I had no idea how I was going to know where I needed to get off.

To make a long story short, I made it to work. It took one and a half hours to get there (normal journey time: 30 minutes)! Not a day I hope to have to relive anytime soon!

# posted by heather @ 2:41 AM