the odyssey

my commute is not that complicated, though it takes a while.  i walk down king street to the metro station, wait for the yellow line to gallery place, transfer to the red to bethesda, and walk a block to the office.  most days i don't even notice that it takes just under an hour.  once i am on the train, i usually have time for both the crossword and the sudoku and to skim the news before i disembark.  not today.

i should have known there would be problems.  DC is notoriously bad when weather conditions are less than optimal.  a light dusting of snow sends the town into... well, a flurry.  still, it didn't seem like that much rain.  i guess northwest of us must have been hit a little harder, because there was still - apparently - a fair amount of flooding.

i could see from the street that the platform was crowded - more crowded, in fact, than i'd ever seen it.  as i reached the top of the escalator, i learned why.  the yellow line was closed between l'enfant plaza and mt. vernon square.  shuttle buses were running.  shit.  my transfer is exactly between those two points.  fortunately i had time to consider my options as several minutes (and by "several," i mean "a lot") elapsed before the next train appeared.

by that point, i'd scrapped my plan of waiting for the blue line and taking a more circuitous route in favor of the first available train.  besides, seats on the blue are sometimes hard to come by.  i figured i'd see how the bus situation looked and make a decision.  what i hadn't counted on was holding the train for at least ten minutes at crystal city.  and i certainly didn't count on holding another twenty minutes at pentagon city.  and though i counted on a cluster at l'enfant plaza it didn't occur to me it would take fifteen minutes just to leave the station.  so i didn't have a whole lot of faith in the bus plan.

i called the office to let them know at 9:20 that i was setting out on foot for farragut north.  i had heard (erroneously, it turned out) that metro center was flooded too, so my plan was to head to the next stop up the line.  but what i thought was farragut was actually macpherson square and farragut was another fifteen to twenty minute walk past that.  it took me forty minutes to get back on the subway after leaving l'enfant plaza.  the only thing preventing me from questioning my judgement was that all of DC was a mess.  constitution avenue was closed, screwing things all up.

one hundred and fifty minutes is entirely too long to spend travelling to work.