Category: Travel

Taxi Lesson 1: Cash or Charge

Two work days, two taxis to the bus, two lessons (at least).  Today’s: If you choose the charge option in the taxi, the driver gets a  smaller tip than if you pay with cash, even though you thought you chose the tip.  The charge machine people and the banks get the difference!

One driver told me that it’s 6% of the total charge for the use of a card, and that it all comes out of his tip.   I can find a few places online that say the same.

I have always thought that the tip calculator in the machine tends us all to higher tips, but not that much higher!

Check the Schedule! (Or Bide Your Time)

On this day, I rushed for a bus that did not exist.  What a bummer.  What’s worse is that this is not the first, or the second, time this has happened.  Oh please I hope it’s the last.

The bus schedule is easy to check.  It’s online.  I’m online.  I just need to take a minute to put those things together in the name of common sense, before I rush for the bus.

On the other hand, I have learned how to use the gift of unexpected open time.  This time it was a latte and a phone chat with a good friend, sitting in the train part of South Station, under the tote board that makes ticka-ticka-ticka sounds as the trains schedules post, even though though the board is 100% electronic and those sounds are only artificial nostalgia.  It works for me!

Plug In Here

I learned that my Boston Express bus (at least the model I was on yesterday) has little labels way up high above the seats, on the luggage compartments, to indicate which seats have electrical outlets available.  There are very few but it turns out they are well marked.

Now if I can remember to have the cord with the electronic item (an OFTEN-learned lesson of 2010), I’ll be all set!

Again with Holiday Eve Squared

It seems fitting that, at the end of a year of learning and recording lessons, I would have to re-learn and re-post something learned only one week ago!

December 30 seems like a few-commuter day, right?  And 3:30 is a nice early time to leave the city, even a really big city like New York, right?

Wrong!

January 30 is New Year’s Eve Eve, so even if a smaller number of people are leaving the city for the holiday weekend, they ALL leave at the same time!  Which, apparently, is about 3:30!

I have learned, I really hope for the last time, to treat these days as high commute days and get out really really early, or very late!

Holiday Eve Squared = Bad Traffic

I have learned that Christmas Eve Eve is NOT a good commute day.

OK, it seemed like low-commuter day, and it was on the way in – record time.

But although the city worker crowd may have been relatively small, apparently they ALL leave at the same time on a day before a holiday. resulting in really bad home-bound traffic.

Number of Problems

Today I learned that when you are meeting someone in a new place, make sure you have their phone number!

Mary lives on a large circle.  There are only houses on the outside of the circle.  She lives at #10 in a blue house, she told me .  My GPS took me to #11 and apparently said “close enough!’.  No, there is no blue house nearby.  But I had no phone number for Mary!

Upon closer inspection, the houses are numbered (I kid you not): …7,9,11,13,15,  I drove more and then found the even numbers, farther along the circle!  Whose great idea was THIS?

So I found #10 and it was blue and I found Mary, but along the way I learned to add the phone number to the contacts and directions, in new place!

Get on the bus, Gus

This is the second time (and please the last time!) that I have learned this: Find out if the line for the bus home is yours or the next one!

This was the second time (ditto) that I assumed that the line forming and waiting was for my bus, only to find out, way too late, that my bus was loading on the platform all that time, and then it left!   This time it meant waiting 45 minutes more because I missed a bus for which I was plenty early.

So ASK (there is that ask again!) the people in line which bus they are queuing for!