Planes, BARTs, & buses.

Perhaps you've seen the movie "Planes, Trains, & Automobiles" with John Candy and Steve Martin? Our weekend looked something like that. Just the transportation issue part of it, though. We had a GREAT time!

In my infinite wisdom, I decided that we should use public transportation to get around during the trip. Really, there's no reason to rent a car to go to San Francisco; you really can't drive once you get there anyway. BUT we didn't GO to San Francisco. We actually FLEW to Oakland, then went to Berkeley, and THEN went to San Francisco, but we had to return to Oakland to fly out. Therein lies the rub.

Getting TO Berkeley wasn't that bad. We arrived in Oakland, took the Air Bart to the Collisseum, caught the BART to Downtown Berkeley, and without too much trouble found the bus to get to Jackie's dorm. Unfortunately, Jackie wasn't there. That's alright, I said, we'll call her! Except she didn't answer her phone. Three times. We started to walk onto campus (dragging the suitcase behind us), but then thought better of it and went back to where we were supposed to meet her. Eventually, we did find each other in a little cafe where we went to eat some breakfast (we had to leave the house at 5:00 am to get there). Once that was settled, we had a great tour of Berkeley, attended classes, and spent too much time and money in the gift shop.


That evening, we WALKED back to the BART station and caught the San Francisco-bound train with no problem. However, we got off the train one stop too early and wound up walking around for a little over an hour trying to find our hotel, which we could SEE, but not find. By the time we did find it, our feet were throbbing from walking all day. We decided to eat dinner at a nearby sushi restaurant to save ourselves for Saturday.

Jackie decided she wanted to do five things on Saturday: ride the cable car, go to the fortune cookie factory in Chinatown, eat clam chowder in a sourdough bowl, visit Ghirardelli Square, and go to City Lights Bookstore. We set out on our quest at 10:00 after stowing our luggage at the hotel. We went to the cable cars (a block from the hotel) and bought Muni passes for the day. The line was really long for the cable car, so we decided to take a bus to Chinatown and then take the cable car back. After about a half hour of wandering and waiting, we were on a bus to Chinatown. There was some sort of huge festival, so the buses were crowded, and so were the streets.
We got off and started trying to find the fortune cookie factory. It was located in an alley, so reading the map and trying to find the alley took about an hour. By some miracle, we DID finally find the factory. There was a tiny sign down an unmarked alley, that we just happened to spot (top left corner of the picture below). We ate yummy fortune cookies and watched the ladies make them. All of this took about five minutes, because the whole "factory" was about the size of a walk-in closet. Mission one accomplished, time to move on.

We decided to catch another bus to Fisherman's Wharf. This was one of the least problematic trips of the day. The bus took us straight down to the Wharf, where we were let off at the final stop. We walked down to Pier 39 and ate clam chowder (except Romina, who wanted a hot dog????). Mission two accomplished.

From there, we walked about six blocks to Ghirardelli Square and ate ice cream in the soda fountain (yummy!) and bought chocolate. Mission three accomplished.

Once again, we decided to take a cable car up to Little Italy. However, the walk over to the cable car line, which was about a mile long, in the 50-degree, 20-mile-an-hour wind made us think that bus travel sounded much more appealing. So we caught another bus.

After wandering around for about forty minutes, we found City Lights, which is the COOLEST BOOKSTORE IN THE WORLD! They have about a million books, and very few copies of any particular title, so that the selection is amazing. It spans three stories. Awesome! I found a CD of Langston Hughes reading his own poetry, Nikki found a new series to read, and we all enjoyed poring over the titles we hope to read someday. Mission four accomplished.

After waiting about 20 minutes for a bus, we were on our way back to the hotel, having given up on the cable cars. We had a plane to catch, after all! The bus took us on the familiar route back to Fisherman's Wharf, but we were not concerned because the route map said it eventually would take us right across the street from our hotel. Then the driver told everyone to get off the bus. WHAT?! I asked him where we were supposed to catch the version of this bus route that would take us where the route map said it would and he started going on about streets we'd never heard of. Defeated, we got off and started walking, searching for another bus with the same number. Five blocks later, we found a stop and a helpful teen who assured us that yes, this bus would take us where we needed to go. After about ten minutes, the bus we needed pulled up, driven by none other than the driver who had just kicked us off! Undaunted, we hopped on, knowing this would be our last bus ride. Little did we know that it would be our most memorable!

At the second stop, a tiny Chinese woman with a huge bag of cans got on the bus. The driver started yelling at her, "No! I told you last week you can't bring that on here! Get off!" The lady smiled, said, "Thank you," and climbed right on. The other Chinese ladies on the bus were clearly disgusted by this and gave her dirty looks and gossiped about her in Chinese. This provided us with entertainment until the bus started to get crowded. VERY crowded. As we moved closer to Chinatown, more and more people got on the bus, all of them Asian. The ladies had been grocery shopping, and started putting their bags behind those of us who were sitting, so I had someone's celery over one shoulder and something that smelled like a dead animal behind me. At this point, Nikki was asleep on my shoulder, so there was nothing I could do. The bus was standing room only, with people packed down the center aisle. And people kept getting on. By the time we got to the heart of Chinatown, the people standing in the middle were three deep. At one stop, the driver didn't even open the doors because there was a huge crowd waiting to get on and the bus couldn't hold anymore people. They started banging on the doors and one lady was yelling at the driver. He was stuck because of traffic, so we sat there crammed together with people yelling and banging on the bus for about ten minutes before we could move. There were also people on the bus who needed to get off, but the driver couldn't open the door for them because of the angry mob outside. Finally, he was able to move up a block and let the people off where only four were waiting to get on. I couldn't see, but a fellow rider reported to his girlfriend that the people at the stop were running for the bus.

Fortunately, our stop was rapidly approaching at this point. When we got to our stop, there was a huge mob of people waiting AGAIN. We got off and looked back, and the aisles were about five people deep! We sighed with relief, retrieved our bags, and headed for the BART, relieved that our adventures in public transportation were almost over. It was 4:30 by then, but our plane didn't leave until 7:05, so we were fine. Or so we thought.

After we'd been on the BART for about ten minutes, Jackie remarked that the surroundings looked unfamiliar. We checked the map, and we were going the WRONG DIRECTION. We jumped off at the next stop and took a train bound the opposite direction. By the time we got re-situated, it was 5:15. We would still be okay, barring any other delays.

We left Jackie at a transfer station at 5:50 and figured out which train to take to the Collisseum. Unfortunately, we had to wait fifteen minutes for said train, which put us at the Collisseum at 6:20, where we still had to catch the Air BART back to the airport. We ran from the train to catch the shuttle, shoving our tickets into the styles to get through, when Nikki panicked. "I can't find my ticket!!" I picked her up and lifted her over the style (all 70 pounds of her) and we RAN to the shuttle, where we waited an additional three minutes until his scheduled departure.

We pulled into the airport at 6:35, and tore into the building. Fortunately, Nikki made us eligible for the "family line" in security, so we made it through security in record time (after having our hot fudge we bought at Ghirardelli Square confiscated-apparently it might blow up??). I realized at that point that I hadn't checked the gate number, so one of the TSAs hollered over that we needed to go to gate 28. We RAN to the gate to find it devoid of people, with a plane still attached to the boarding gate, but bound for Ontario? I went over to a Southwest employee and asked her about our flight that was scheduled to leave at 7:05 for San Diego. She looked at my boarding pass and said, "You mean 7:20? It's delayed, but it is leaving from gate 28." We looked at each other and laughed, sat down and snacked on fortune cookies.

The plane wound up leaving at 8:00 after having been delayed in Denver.

See? Steve Martin had nothing on us. :)