Here in Minneapolis, there's now a light-rail line. (Yes, there's just one line, but from there you can transfer to buses and such.) So I decided to take my sons and my niece Emily on a little ride. My brother Ben and his family came along too.
My nieces were excited to ride the train, but by sons were pretty blase about it:
Oh, boy! We get to ride a tramway almost exactly like the one we ride every day back home in Switzerland.
My kids just wanted to go because they're interested in unusual coins, and Louise (my SiL) told them that the ticket machine gives dollar coins as change.
I also learned an important lesson that day: If you're wearing beige pants, don't put your black camera-case in your lap just before handing someone your camera to take a picture.
Yes, I am wearing pants in this picture.
The verdict: Better than nothing, but not quite the same level of convenience as the transportation in Zurich. ;)
5 comments:
LMAO! Yay for the LRT. Yay for pants! Mostly, yay for Mpls. Do you ever miss it? I mean, not in winter, for sure. :)
Hey Ren!!!
Yeah, sometimes I miss it -- but definitely not the winter or the mosquitoes. ;^)
Do they still have the "small kindness" boxes at some of the LRT stations? I thought those were so cute… until people kept destroying them, of course. Sigh. I'd love to see fun stuff like that at train stations over here, and I want to believe that they wouldn't get wrecked, but who knows.
Hey Lorry!!!
I didn't see any. What are they?
This summer, along with my 10-year-old son, I was able to try out the light-rail systems in Seattle and Salt lake City for the first time. Seattle's was especially impressive; we are able to travel by light rail all the way from Everett (a more-than-a-suburb to the north) right to the Seattle-Tacoma airport with a one-block walk to switch trains in downtown Seattle. We're still a long way from Europe (or Mexico City, for that matter) in terms of developing public transportation for most cities, but hopefully these fairly new transportation systems are a good sign of things to come.
Post a Comment