Here you see what happens once I get off the train in Waltham Center. Here I catch the bus. There is a short walk from where I get off the train (the marker in the lower right hand corner) to where I catch the bus (the next marker to the left). Most of the time it's an MBTA bus which my train pass is good for. In a pinch though I sometimes catch a Waltham CitiBus which costs $1.
When I use the MBTA, I take the 70A bus which presents many challenges. At best, it comes every half hour. Many times the signs on the bus don't work. Occasionally it even says "OUT OF SERVICE". Usually in these cases there will be a hand-written sign on a piece of paper in the front of the bus giving the route number. There are many variations on these themes.
There is a closely-related bus, 70, which comes from the same place, but goes to a completely different place. I've never managed to get on that by mistake since its sign is always working. Sometimes the 70A bus will claim it is 70. But those times, it never says "Cedarwood" which the real 70 bus says. There's also a few other MBTA bus routes that stop at Waltham Center. When the connection with the 70A is going badly, they are sometimes a temptation, but I've never succumbed to it.
The other problem is when the 70A comes early (or the train comes late) and I miss my connection. At some scheduled times it seems to arrive chronically early, and other times it arrives chronically late. The train runs pretty much to schedule, though 5 minutes late is not infrequent. It's taken some experimentation to find a bus-train nexus that works for me.
Another idiosyncracy of the 70A is that it loops when it reaches North Waltham. This means in the morning it comes by only one side of the street and in the evening it only comes by the other side of the street. This really doesn't affect commuters too much because it behaves they way they expect: in the morning they leave it on one side of the street and in the evening they catch it on the other side.
For someone just coming to North Waltham for a few hours though it can be confusing. I think I came for an interview once and blythely watched the bus I should have caught passing by on the other side of the street thinking it would come back and pick me up a few minutes later. Nice bus drivers will wave to people waiting on the other side of the street telling them that this is the bus they want to catch, and I try to clue them in as well when I see them occasionally.
I've gone on a bit excessively here. The 70A bus actually works pretty well for me. It beats walking all the way (which takes about an hour). The bus doesn't careen through people's yards on its way to where I work. That's just the GPS's misconception again. I did have it brush a telephone pole once. Some of the turns it has to make are very tight, and many times cars waiting at the intersection have to back up to make room for the bus to maneuver. The Waltham CitiBus's don't suffer from this problem as much as they are shorter and perhaps they are routed slightly differently so they don't have to deal with small residential streets.
When I get off the bus, there's another walk to get to 100 Fifth Avenue where my employer is located. That's shown between the last two dots on the route. It's about the scale of the walk I take in Shirley, perhaps a little shorter. There is a sort of park on the route which makes the walk more pleasant.
The third dot back is another stop I occasionally get off at. When I first started commuting to Waltham, I always got off at that stop. It makes for a nice walk as well, and now that there are stairs between the two Lycos buildings, it should be possible to walk it even during the winter. It is a little more uphill, and crossing Totten Pond Rd. without a stop light can be tricky.
I used to stand there in the evenings for the bus back to Waltham Center. There's usually a cop there in the evening to stop traffic for the cars coming out of the parking lot. I admired the courage of the ones who stood in the middle of the road to stop them. Finally though they all decided to start stopping the cars from the side of the road which seemed a lot safer. Still, the way people come down that hill, it seems fairly risky just to wait for the bus there.
I'll end with a calendula for Sherry.
