Truthful Tuesday: On The Move

This week, Di has chosen methods of transportation for Truthful Tuesday:

How do you prefer to travel  (plane, car, boat, bike, train, other)?

Well, lessee…

I didn’t drive until I was 28, which meant taking buses and light rail when I had to go somewhere, like school or work. I started taking the Chicago Transit Authority’s trains and buses as a freshman in high school, when I was at St. Ignatius College Prep. I would take the Englewood/Jackson Park-Howard line from Loyola Avenue to Roosevelt Road, then transfer to the #12 Roosevelt Road bus to school. It was later that I found out that, if you were to exit the campus through the rear fence and walk several blocks, you could catch the Congress/Douglas-Milwaukee train to Washington, then walk through a tunnel to the Howard train, and save 10 cents each way because you didn’t need a transfer between the train lines.

Riding public transit had its advantages (chiefly not having to find a place to park that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, no parking permits, etc.), but I was at the mercy of the schedules, and if I had to carry anything more than a briefcase or a book bag, it got very clumsy. Not to mention having to stand when the bus or train was crowded, sometimes for the entire trip. One interesting feature was what Bill Cosby called “A Nut In Every Car.” (Knowing Cosby has turned his name to mud over the last few years, I won’t embed the video. Trust me, though, when Cosby was funny, there were few people funnier.)

In my high school and college years, I frequently rode my bicycle (called a “push bike” in some parts of the world). I rode it to school every day when I was in high school that the weather permitted (i.e. whenever there wasn’t a foot of snow on the ground). When I was at Notthwestern, I would ride my bike there in the off-hours, when there was no bus to take me home.

When I did start driving, I bought a 1984 Chevy Cavalier, which was a good car at first, but I had a couple of accidents in it, and it developed transmission trouble twice, the second time so bad that I got it home, put it in the other half of our two-car garage, and called a friend to help me find a new car. The second car was a 1989 Dodge Omni, which, for all the bad things you might have heard about Dodges, was a decent car and one that I enjoyed driving. I traded that in for a 1992 Honda Accord, which we had for over 20 years and only got rid of (we donated it) when it was costing more than it was worth, and besides, I had stopped driving thanks to the stroke. In 2002 we bought a 2002 Honda Odyssey which is still our main form of transportation, after 20 years. We’re hoping to get a few more years out of it before the government orders us to buy an electric car.

I traveled by air frequently during my twenty years at the twenty-year job, and at the job I had up to when I had my stroke. That sounds glamorous until you do it for a while, and after a while the airlines did everything they could to make flying as uncomfortable and humiliating as possible. Without telling you what he really said, I heard someone compare it to riding in a cattle car. I thought for certain they’d have people hanging off straps in the aisles before long. And, despite the BS story that they tell about there being the same amount of room between you and the seat in front of you that there was in the 1980’s, there’s barely enough room to climb into your seat, and forget leaning the seat back if you value your life.

Anyway, I really enjoyed driving. The Accord made a few trips to Chicago, as did the Odyssey, which we bought because we were bringing things back from my in-laws’ building, which Mary inherited. Since the stroke, Mary does all the driving, meaning we don’t go outside of a radius of about five miles from home, and that suits me just fine. That’s my preferred method of travel at this point, riding shotgun with Mary driving, on those increasingly rare occasions that I leave the house.