My days of swooping down into the city on my dark blue steed may be over. With gas prices on the rise, it's getting harder to afford driving down and parking in the city every day for work.
So I reviewed my options. I could drive down to Greenbelt (which is about half the distance to work) then metro into the city. Or I could slide over to the Dorsey MARC station and take the train then metro.
The Greenbelt Option saves me a little bit of money but the metro ride is kind of long and it makes me nauseous. That was a fun couple of days.
Today I tried my first trip down using the MARC option. Overall I think it is a contender because it saves me 50% on my transportation expenses. But let me tell you about today.
First, I get to the Dorsey station, park, and walk up to the station building. Once inside you can see that they no longer have a ticket booth, and the one electronic kiosk is out of order. So on-board ticketing it is! I can see how this structure might serve a purpose in extreme cold or in rain, but otherwise it seems to be a giant useless greenhouse with benches, trapped stale air and no tickets.
Other than that, the morning commute goes swimmingly. I get some work done on my netbook. The ticket guy doesn't charge me the on-train fee (since there was no way to buy the ticket in Dorsey), and the metro ride from Union Station to Farragut West is much quicker than I thought. I think I exaggerated in my head how far those two stations were from one another. I'm actually on-time to work (which is a big feat since more often than not I would spend the first half hour of my work day in my car cursing my way up 18th street because there's a motorcade or a bus full of tourists crossing the street up by Penn Ave).
The only weird moment was right after I and many of my fellow passengers had settled into our seats at Dorsey... this man and woman walk into my train car and immediately the woman goes "oh no, this is not going to work. we're going back to the other car" .....
wait wha?
hey, come back. what's wrong with this car??? Is it something I need to know?
Really it was just the way she basically announced it to the car, and then strong armed her man friend out of there... leaving the rest of us wondering what was so awful about where we had all chosen to sit.
The afternoon commute was slightly painful. We had a lot of delays, but it was particularly annoying because I think I was on the car with all the super impatient and dramatic people.
First we were delayed leaving union station. A few grumblings here and there. Then before we get to our first destination we come to a complete stop. The conductor comes on the PA and announces "we think there may be a defect with the train and we are checking on it now."
Impatient people: "..... and???? how long is it going to take? You'd think they'd at least tell us that!" "Ugh I'm gonna be so late"
Dramatic People: "This is the worst!"
About 10 minutes passes (which mind you is a long time if you are waiting on any sort of mass transit).
Conductor: "We are done checking one side. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong. We should be able to begin moving again once a train coming in the opposite directions passes us. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Another 3 or 4 minutes go by then a train whizzes by us. Literally the minute the last car of that train passes by our windows you hear:
"aw for christsakes! Why aren't we moving!" (that would be impatient person #2)
Dramatic Person: "We are never going to get home at this rate."
Within a few minutes we slowly begin to move again. And the angry passengers go back to being docile sheep, grateful that this commute may be a little wacky at times, but it still costs half as much as driving.
