Insane bus adventure

Had to share this crazy (unlucky!) story about John & his friends taking the MAX (or at least trying to) down to a Portland Trailblazers game. A couple of highlights from his unfortunate night:

• Plugged “$15″ into the ticket machine at the Gateway transit center only to discovery that the MAX was dead and that they would have to take a bus to get to the Rose Garden
• Took 40 minutes for them to get to 7th and Halladay from Gateway on a bus that was apparently manned by a driver who “was not familiar with this part of Portland, much less navigating narrow streets to transport a sardine stuffed bus from one MAX station to the next.”
• Then on the way home: “There was a brief moment when the entire bus gasped as the metal scraped across the concrete and made a ssssssssssccccccccccccrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeecccccccccccccccchhhhhhh! and the bus tipped violently to the left then right as the tires went over the islands.”

Wow! Out of control! The one takeaway I have from that whole post is:

“But, I want to put the blame for the adventure we were about to begin on the helpful and courteous TriMet employees who were wandering around the Gateway station. They could have interrupted us when we were plugging $15 into the ticket machine to tell us that MAX was dead and that we and several hundred of our fellow passengers would soon be jammed into a bus and sent bumping around narrow surface streets between MAX Stations.”

That sucks!  Well, better luck next time…