Darkness and a pigeon fight

Saturday morning I got up at 4:39 am to get ready to catch the 5:41 am bus to San Francisco. It was going to be a 3 hour tour of public transit to reach my final destination of Menlo Park. Why? A new free car.

I was going to get a ride from Meredith, but then once I realized how long a car trip it was going to be, I didn't really want to subject her and her children to wasting a nice Saturday to indulge my sick facination with old European shitboxes. Laurel can attest to time wasted during my VW phase, and I didn't want to make that same mistake twice. At any rate, I was trying to figure out how to get down there (my other friends either had plans, or were pretty reluctant to drive almost 2 hours through SF on a Saturday), when I stumbled upon www.511.org which is the public transit clearing house for the Bay Area. I simply put in my address, and my destination and that I wanted the fastest trip, leaving as early as possible, and it told me all I needed to know. Pretty neat, yet another reason why I like the internet. I was actually pretty excited to see how the transit system faired in a long distance journey like that (being an advocate for transit and bikes myself...) I will ignore the irony of taking transit to pick up an old polluting car so I can drive the mile and a half to work...ok back to the story:

The 80 to SF was lovely, it was dark, cool, and I got to sleep and listen to NPR on my mp3 player. I was really sacked out (drool, neckache, the whole deal, I even think I was snoring), but I did notice that the bus got really full. It's weird, I never would've thought about a pre-dawn Saturday bus being fully loaded, but it was. By the time we got to SF the sun was coming up. I was particularly smitten with SF that morning. Everything was cool and quiet, with little stirrings of activity. Guys washing the sidewalk. Bums gradually waking up from doorways, and trying to stomp off the chill in their bones. Freshly scubbed hipsters walking dogs downtown. It was gorgeous. It made me miss living in the City.
The bus dropped us off at the Bay Terminal (which is a stunning part of the city in the early morning). I got off groggily, and gave some cigarrettes to the bums on the benches. Then I was struck by the pigeons on the wires so I took a picture. A few seconds later, a young teenager in a pink puffy coat started feeding them, and they swarmed both of us. Sleepily I starting chewing on a bagel, and before I knew it, pigeions were levitating about a foot in front of my face trying to get a piece. I had to actually slap at them (shoo pigeon! shoo!) to keep them from stealing my bagel. I hadn't planned on this part, and it was quite a strange ordeal to eat breakfast. My struggle against the feathered infidels made the bums and the girl laugh quietly.

After that I hopped on the bus for Menlo Park. To be continued...