Today was the beginning of a big change in my university career.

For most of my time at SFU, all of it actually, I was up on the Burnaby Mountain campus. For the first time, I have a class at one of the two satelite SFU campuses: this being Harbour Centre, where I am taking the evening session of Japanese 100.

Leaving Burnaby Mountain at 4 PM, I figured I would have plenty of leeway to get downtown, given the heavy snowfall we had today. What I would not have expected was the bus getting jack-knifed while turning off of Gaglardi Way onto the Burnaby Mountain Parkway, effectively blocking passage into that way down Burnaby Mountain (unless you went through University Drive East, but that area is the steeper way out.

The funny thing about this was that as soon as it happened, the bus driver got out of the bus and proceeded to take pictures of his jack-knifed bus. Nonetheless, this incident further deepens my dislike of Translink’s articulated buses. Sure, they are fine on the B-Line routes, especially the 99 route, as most of the paths are straight lines and flat roads, but when you use those things on the curvy, steep roads at SFU, it doesn’t really work all that well.

Obviously, because the bus is completely blocking that path for other 144s and 135s from getting off the hill on Hastings side, we had to get out of the bus and start walking in the snow to get down to somewhere that I can actually catch a bus from. That ended up being the intersection of Hastings Street and Inlet Drive, a good 3 kilometres in the snow down from where that poor bus got jack-knifed.

Now there with a few other hikers who made it from the stranded bus, we rejoiced as a 144 headed for Metrotown Station showed up. Now normally, the 144 does not even come here at all, but heads south at Duthie and Hastings, but a bus is a bus, and it will get me to where I want at possibly a faster time, since it means I can SkyTrain. Yay SkyTrain!

In the end, this supposide 45 minute trip took 1 hour and 40 minutes, leaving me late for class by 10 minutes, which really sucked. Oh well. The trip itself was a welcome change to the same old boring routine, even if it was inconvenient.

I just hope it doesn’t happen again, because we will get quizzes for JAPN 100 and if we miss 3/20 quizzes, we get 0 for that 15% of our mark.

Ouch.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Life, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.