Day 14 - Adventure #2 - Public Transportation

FREE Adventure #2 - Public Transportation

It never fails to amaze me how kids get the biggest enjoyment out of the simplest things, like The BUC. I never even saw this one coming, and it worked out so perfectly...SO well, in fact, that all the boys want to do tomorrow is go ride The BUC! (Haleigh is at her friend's for a sleepover, so she wasn't with us on this adventure.)

What is The BUC?

BUC is Buckhead Uptown Connection--"A fast, frequent and FREE way to make tracks around Buckhead!" Buckhead is the fairly upscale, urban area of Atlanta that we live in (for now). Living within this cloistered environment, we enjoy some of the finest shopping, dining, and entertainment available in the Southeast, as well as a busy business and financial district and world-class tourism. We don't tend to take advantage of much of all that, preferring our Target/Publix/Borders shopping corner, but we do frequent the theatres at Phipps Plaza, and the Apple Store and the Food Court at Lenox Mall(a nice shopping mall), which is right across the street (a famous five-lane road called Peachtree Street) from Phipps Plaza (a very nice shopping mall).

The BUC is a high-end, energy-efficient, luxury transportation system "designed in an effort to improve accessibility and mobility in the Buckhead area"--in other words, move the people with money around easily amongst the high-priced shops, restaurants, hotels, office towers, and other venues for Buckhead employees, visitors, and residents. It is a FREE shuttle system, with a fleet of 10 compressed natural gas (CNG) buses (very nice, very clean), that run a 7-mile circuit with 25 stops, continuously, with a bus stopping every 8 - 15 minutes at every stop.

This is what my (very high) property tax dollars are paying for--we have The BUC, instead of adding on to the public elementary school so that all of our children, grades K thru 5, could stay together at one main campus. No, we have The BUC, and last year our Kindergarden students were annexed to a separate facility in a local church, about two miles from the main campus of the school. But I digress...and I'm clearly a little annoyed at the whole situation, but that's not really the point. (We're moving anyway.)

The point is, we had never ridden The BUC, and for some reason, that seemed like a grand adventure to the boys, and actually a convenient solution for transportation, since I needed to drop the old Jeep off at Goodyear for service, and we wanted to go back across Buckhead to Target. From Goodyear, we walked about half-mile to a BUC stop, and managed to run down the bus, even though we didn't need to--we didn't know at the time that The BUC stops every 8 - 15 minutes.

You might think, on FREE transportation, that it might be dirty or well-used or have a lot of homeless people just riding around all day, but not in Buckhead. We were about the most dressed-down people on the bus, in shorts and tshirts. There were office workers and businesspeople; there were what could have been nannies or housekeepers, riding from their place of employment in private Buckhead homes to the more public transportation throughout the City; and there were lots of well-dressed, decked-out black kids, male and female, hip-hop style, riding between Phipps Plaza and Lenox Mall. It was interesting and entertaining, and completely non-threatening. (I don't mean the hip-hop kids, I mean sometimes when you ride the train or the city bus, you encounter all kinds of strange characters that can make you nervous, but not in Buckhead.)

We rode almost the entire route, and got off The BUC at Target, where we shopped a little and hung out (the boys played the Playstation games in Electronics) and had a soda at the lunch counter. We could have walked home from Target, which is about a mile from the house, but we ended up catching a ride with Daddy, who picked us up on his way home.

All in all, very low-key. I didn't think it was as exciting or fascinating as the boys, but it was fine. Comfortable. The best part about it was how excited and happy they were to be riding around on this bus--who would of thought? They were so impressed, and had such a good time, they want to go back and do it all over again tomorrow. We'll see--

Comments

[Gina Downey]

We don't have the upscale transportation here in Florissant, MO, but I remember riding the bus to go shopping with my sisters when I was a kid, it was so exciting! I think I'll take the girls on a public transportation ride to the mall. Thanks for the idea!