My great-grandmother, Nan, died Tuesday night and the services were to be held this weekend in my hometown in Woodstock, NY.
Since I’ve been away every single weekend for the past 4 weekends and this being the last “official” weekend of the summer with Labor Day this Monday, I did not want to drive up to NY.
Instead I did the green thing. I took every possible mode of public transportation there is, sans a few.
In the morning, Leah and I started our 8+ hour trip up to New York state. It was a fun experience, and albeit a little stressful at the start, but easy sailing the rest of the way. The first thing Leah and I did, we took the Ride-On bus from outside where we live in Maryland to the local Metro station, Shady Grove.
We were supposed to take the subway to Metro Center to catch the Bolt Bus to NYC. Our Ride-On bus was supposed to be at our stop by 10:02am but did not arrive until more than 20 minutes later, of course, setting me into a panic mode. If we missed our 11:30am Bolt Bus, we would have to find another way up to NYC.
Side Note: This was the third time I’ve taken Bolt. And, it’s awesome! Bolt is owned by Greyhound (evident by the lettering on the cargo panel on the side of the bus), and I paid $24 for a one-way ticket for one person. Three-fourths of the seats are outfitted with 110v outlets and there is free WiFi on the bus! Yesterday the WiFi didn’t work, but I used our plugs to watch movies and to do work on my laptop. I highly recommend Bolt if you ever needed a cost-effective method of transportation up to NYC (or even to Philadelphia).
We barely made it to the Bolt Bus stop in DC outside the Metro Center station with seven minutes to spare! Sweating, we found seats. Boy, was Leah excited to be on a bus to see her “great-great-grandma, who’s dead.”
After 5 hours of driving (which seemed like an hour to me with no stress), mainly due to holiday weekend traffic, we arrived outside Penn Station/Madison Square Garden to meet my sister, Melanie. She lives in Queens and teaches 6th grade in Manhattan.
After a quick stop at Sbarro’s to eat a slice of pizza — not the NYC variety, mind you — we boarded the famed NYC subway red line #1 uptown. Then we boarded the purple #7 line to Grand Central Terminal to buy tickets for the Metro North train (NYC’s version of the DC region’s MARC/VRE lines).
We took the train 1.2 hours north to Poughkeepsie — the last stop on the train — to meet my brother, Trevor. He then drove the last one hour up to Woodstock.
The cost of the entire trip from DC to Woodstock?
Ride-on Bus: Free (with Metro disabled card)
Metro: $4.25 for the two of us
Bolt Bus: $48.50 for two tickets
Subway: $2.00 (Leah was free)
Metro North: $7.75 (with disabled card)
Total: $62.50
That’s equal to one tank of gas for our gas-guzzling SUV, along with the fact that we didn’t wear down our engine, oil, tires, and emitted no CO2.
Sure, the trip took a bit longer than it would have if we had drove directly, but I concur — we went into NYC. If we had drove up, we would have gone through northern NJ instead.
Aside from no airplane or ferry (or a boat), we took every possible public transportation there was to get to our destination and Mother Earth is grateful.
And I got a stress-free trip up where I could actually focus on my daughter instead of the asphalt.