Touristing at home

This year, new ways to get to Montreal were introduced to the South Shore, just in time to mitigate the chaos caused by the closing of the LaFontaine tunnel, 8 months after the fact. The planning abilities of governments and NGO's boggles sometimes. Essentially they told the thousands of people suddenly cut off from their place of employment to 'take a bus' without adding additional bus routes.  There is a reason we don't use the buses around here. Most of them don't go where you need them to go, don't go when you need them, and cost a fortune to take.

Actually, after 25 years, they finally did do something about the last part. They forced all the disparate bus companies to use the same regional pricing and zones. So now I can get to work for $3.75 a trip, instead of $6.50 + $3.50. lousy scheduling between busses means that it takes an hour longer than it should. Really lousy planning means I have to go three towns over, and come back one because of jurisdictional jealousy.
Could be worse, Sarah often has to go 2 towns over and 3 back just to get home from work. 

And they wonder why we all prefer to use cars...


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Settling in

Image
Karen's travel tips If you arrive in Quito on a Sunday evening, better have snacks with you! The carpets roll up and the metal doors come down at 6. Well, at least they do in the neighborhood where we are spending the night. There are a lot of restaurants close by, but nothing open. Add to this that apart from a tuna wrap at Dorval airport the only thing I could eat on the plane was the fruit salad (the steward kindly gave me two), and the pineapple juice, by Monday morning we were both feeling somewhat light headed when we set off down the many, many, many steps down to the commercial district (visualise Mount Royal, only steeper, no hand rails, and a descent at least twice as far, with your head spinning). Needless to say, we were a bit early for breakfast in the commercial district, but a cafe kindly opened early for us, and I essentially inhaled eggs, avocado toast, fruit salad and an almond milk cappuccino. Serge, who had ordered a larger breakfast actually ran out
Read more

As plumbers, we should not quit our day jobs

Serge and I actually managed to fix our kitchen sink! It was one of those little niggling things that you get used to working around, and then you (after a couple of years) forget about. But while we were away, the faucet worked its way loose, so Serge borrowed some tool from his dad, and we spent 20 minutes dancing around eachother with me trying to hold the faucet in place, and him doing mysterious things under the sink. Apparently the spray hose really complicates things. Just when I thought he had had enough of house maintenance for the season, he decided we should finally fix the leaky sink by replacing the drain basket.  Well, not surprisingly, when I had bought the widget, it seemed like a simple install. Unscrew this, slide out that, pop in the new assembly, tighten everything up and you're done. Right? Wrong. What we had was not a standard assembly. Although we could loosen everything, the various pipes were too long to remove. I think the whole thing must have been instal
Read more