Public Transit

“Get some sun, you’re in Miami!” shouted the drunk girl partying near us on the beach. I looked down at my blaring farmer’s tan and quickly understood the exclamation was directed at me.

But that wouldn’t be the worst of what was to come… I would soon be lost on a bus, lost on a train, food poisoned, bitten by weird insects, sunburned, ripped off by several restaurants, and thrown off my sleep schedule. Yes, as you might have guessed I was on vacation.

Vacations for my wife and me always turn out to be much more stressful, painful, and hectic than our day-to-day life. But as I keep telling her, we should be thankful our vacations are the way they are—they make our regular life seem so relaxing.

Though it’s my fault, not hers, that our vacations are so rough--I like to get out and explore when I’m in new country. I want the REAL experience. I find the best way to do that is to be one with the locals. I want to shop where they shop, eat where they eat, and commit crime where they commit crime.

However, my wife’s idea of a vacation stems from an absurd idea that when you go on a vacation you are supposed to unwind, settle down, and forget the cares of the world.

I think my tactic for forgetting the cares of the world is better than hers, though: it’s impossible to think of the cares of the world when you’re on a bus to who knows where, getting off who knows when, sitting next to who knows who, who is speaking who knows what. That is why I always try to talk my wife into taking the bus to different sites when we’re in our vacation city.

Despite all our terrible bus-experiences from past trips (like the time on our honeymoon I got us stranded in some back-woods village in Mexico), this last time I swayed her into riding the bus by promising our destination would be a very nice beach in a state park.

However, I left out the minor details of the obstacles that stood in our way: we had to go through several questionable areas of downtown Miami, transfer from our bus to the Metromover, then transfer to another bus, which would take us within a couple miles of our final destination, which would be reached by walking through the outskirts of a rain forest.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that was the way it went—but we got lost at our first transfer and it was all down hill from there. But I still found bright spots in the voyage. I got to listen to music on the first bus—I sat next to an aspiring rapper who wasn’t afraid to practice out loud. I was eager to give him some tips, but for some reason he didn’t fully comprehend my street cred. Now the kid will never make it big.

Me being the problem-solving explorer I am, I guided us through the mess and we reached the beach I promised. My wife really liked it; she looked very relaxed as she lay on the sand. And I’m sure the journey made it seem even more relaxing.