My morning and evening bus routes
Don’t give me that look — it’s travel, it’s just travel on a low scale. And after all, I do go from one city to another, every working day. It’s a well known route, to be sure, but it also provides its little surprises still.
The thing about it is that it’s actually not a fixed situation for me — there’s one bus line that goes past my apartment complex which intersects with two other ones down the way, both of which will get me to the UCI campus and my job. As the first route has a schedule which can be charitably described as ‘flexible,’ each day is actually a bit of a challenge in that often I have to decide which of the two intersecting routes to take. This is all the more important in that those two routes only come by once every thirty minutes, so a delay in getting one or the other means I’m stuck hanging around a stop for a while, running a definite risk of making it into work late. This might not matter as much if I wasn’t in charge of opening the library front door each day.
So much for requirement, but what about the trip itself? Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer, as noted, but often long enough that I can either lose myself in reading just fine or else just lose myself in the sights on the way. Not that they’re necessarily spectacular, a couple of minimalls, some freeway overpasses and so forth. But part of the main route, if I go down to the second and further away of the connecting routes, goes through the Newport Beach Back Bay. When the morning is sunny enough, it’s a lovely spectacle to see the reeds and grasses in an area which, while surrounded by some reasonably low-key development is still for the moment kept as it is, bordered on either sides by low rises, including the actual mesa which gives Costa Mesa its name. It’s even more spectacular in the evening, as the setting sun directly glitters off the bay as I make my way to my return connection spot.
When I walk to that spot, I’m always going past one of the many apartment complexes around the area, bordered by a hedge. In that hedge live a warren of rabbits, happily content to sneak out when nobody is passing on the sidewalk — it’s not the busiest of pedestrian locales, unsurprising given the favoring of car culture around here — to nibble on the grass. They’re wary of humans, of course, and so if they are out there in the late afternoon haze and heat, they eventually notice my approaching figure, sit up and eventually dash back to the hedge. A pity I’ll never be able to see them close up, but seeing them and the glistening bay and more makes for a lovely way to end a work day, on a trip I take by necessity but which I would never otherwise likely see.