8 mile (or kilometre)

I love public transit. Those that know me know this to be true. I love that everyone is equal on the bus. I love that my bus driver allows people that don’t have enough money to get on the bus. I love that he saw a girl running for the bus stop this morning (the same young girl that he picks up at that particular stop every morning) and pulled over – before the actual bus stop – and allowed her to jump on. That’s awesome. The thing that is not awesome however, is my most recent discovery. You see, the other love of my life (besides public transit and R.H. Phillips Shiraz) is running. A fellow co-worker of mine who lives at Granville and 5th shares my enthusiasm and recently introduced me to the concept of running home after work. I mulled this idea around in my pea head for a little while, trying to figure out the logistics of it (leaving clothes behind at work, making sure my keys are on me, the stigma of some of my colleagues seeing me in my running togs) and then decided sure, I will run home. I save on bus fare and I get my exercise in. It will be a well-lit, fairly populous route (maybe a little too populous in the downtown core, but I’ve resolved to view it more as an obstacle course, i.e. the obstacle is to not be aggressively panhandled or get hit by a car… or even more ironically: a bus) and I should get home at a decent time. I then decided to key the coordinates in to Google maps to get an idea of the distance; I mean it’s a thirty five minute bus ride to get home in the evening! It’s all the way downtown! It’s far! It’s 8.1 kilometers? Puzzled, I checked that I had correctly inputted the addresses. I traced the route to confirm that it was correct. Lo and behold I live 8.1 kilometers from my office. Why does it take me half an hour to get to work? I’m not an exceptionally fast runner (as I have been told repeatedly), but even running a six minute kilometer (I typically manage a five) it should feasibly take me 48 minute to get home. That means that if I leave here at 5:15 I should be home around 6pm. When I take the bus I get home at 5:45. So essentially I will be arriving home at the same time running, versus taking the bus. Yeah. On the one hand I’m excited that I can now get my exercise in while still getting home “on time” so that I can go out after and party (cause I am the original party animal). On the other hand, dude. We need faster buses or something.
My final odd transit story is this: some time ago Michael gave me a 3 zone bus ticket (an attempt to entice me to come and visit him in North Van, no doubt). I have now used this same ticket twice to get to North Van. I am an honest person and I don’t want to scam Tranlink (although typically I only buy a 2 zone ticket for the seabus even though the seabus is a 3 zone, because I don’t agree that it costs $3.25 for a quick jaunt across the water). I guess I should retract that statement: very rarely I will scam Translink. At any rate, I keep on ending up with this 3 zone ticket in my pocket because I don’t know where I’m supposed to get it stamped! I rush past all the little ticket dispensers and know I don’t need to go there because I already have a ticket. And then I get down to the waiting area and… and what? Where do I get my ticket punched (literally, not figuratively)? It’s a mystery to me, Charlie Brown. Maybe I’ll just bring my kayak downtown and kayak across. You know, run home on Tuesdays, kayak to North Van on Fridays…