Transit on summer holiday 2010, Part 1

Our family traveled a lot in July. Texas, Nevada, Eastern California, and Washington D.C. And yes, I tried to use transit whenever possible. Here's part 1 of what worked and what didn't.

First, North Texas. To get to Sea-Tac Airport, I took an express bus with my 12-year-old son from home to downtown Seattle, then caught Central Link light rail to the airport. No problems there, though light rail is slower than the #194 express bus it replaced (to say nothing of taking twice as long as driving), and drops you off about 3/8 of a mile from the terminal, but it still saved us a bunch in parking costs.

From Amarillo, Texas to a farm 100 miles north was a transit vacuum. There was no expectation that any such thing was possible, and it would have been foolish to try -- there are places where transit works and where it doesn't, and one of the places public transit simply does not work is in rural areas. Interestingly, I was able to attend a wind farm presentation there -- North Texas is home to some good-sized wind farms, with more on the way once the grid gets upgraded to accommodate them.

Then it was back to Seattle for a week in the office (heading home from the airport on light rail and an express bus, of course) before driving to Reno and then to Mammoth Mountain in Eastern California, where the rest of my family had gone while I was working back home. They flew there from Texas, but driving to meet them gave us increased mobility plus the ability for everyone to drive home without having to pay for return flights.

Reno has a bus system, of course, but its service to my parents' part of town is very limited, and frankly I would rather bike. Reno has remarkably extensive bike facilities despite not much usage that I've observed. In any case, I was only there for a couple days visiting my parents, so didn't get out of the house much or beyond their activities at all. I played a bunch of guitar and listened to a lot of good music over copious quality libations with my Dad, though, so it was a wonderful side trip.

I usually find a way to use the bus system in Mammoth on our vacations, and this trip was no exception, though even at 8000' altitude the bus still has to compete with the ease and convenience of bicycling. With my younger kids, though, those free buses can be very handy. There's a Mammoth Jazz Festival that coincided with our visit, and there were some complicated transfers of kids that happened around it, involving our minivan, my bike (which I'd brought on our rack along with one belonging to my kids), and the bus, which is configured to look like a trolley with all the windows removed, a big hit with my kids. The difference in the feel of riding around in a bus without windows vs the closed-in feeling of riding transit buses is remarkable, but I don't know how easy it would be to translate that experience to Seattle.

More on the second, more transit-intensive portion of our July trips next time.