This past weekend my wife Jennifer and I decided we needed to take an adventure together, and what better way to do that then to ride the new valley metro light rail! Neither of us really knew where the light rail went or how long it would take us to get there, all we knew was that there was a platform a half a block from our apartment, and that the train would eventually take us to downtown Phoenix.

Our adventure began right away when we arrived at the platform. A huddle of people surrounded the ATM-ticket’thingy with confused looks on their faces. I’m not sure what they were confused about because we decided not to buy tickets, but I’m guessing it had to do with the half dozen different ticket options to choose from. We both heard that it was supposed to be free for the first few weeks, so we decided to try our luck; we could always fall back on the fact that we heard it was free if we got caught. The platform had a kind of nostalgic Disneyland monorail feel to it at first, completely non-threatening, and when we boarded the train it was clean and only sort of full, we actually found two seats next to each other. As the ride progressed we passed a few familiar places,

 “I used to eat there” my wife commented.

 “…and I used to live there”

It was all pretty fun. However after a few stops it started to feel like that Weird Al song Another one rides the bus:

(Chorus)
Another one rides the [train]
Another one rides the [train]
Another comes on and another comes on
Another one rides the [train]
Hey, who's gonna sit by you
Another one rides the [train]

There's a suitcase poking me in the ribs
There's an elbow in my ear
There's a smelly old bum standing next to me 
Hasn't showered in a year
I think I'm missing a contact lens
I think my wallet's gone
And I think this [train] is stopping again
To let a couple more freaks get on look out

We started to see people from all spectrums of society getting on the train, and not very many getting off. It started to bring feelings of germaphobia and claustrophobia and other non-PC phobias I’m not going to mention.

After about a 30min. ride we reached our destination. How did we know it was our destination? Because we reached the middle of downtown Phoenix and we didn’t know where we were; mission accomplished!

We walked down a few streets and saw a sign for the Phoenix convention center. Our first thought was that we would join whatever convention was going on and become part of the crowd. If there was a cowboy convention being held, we would become cowboy and cowgirl, if it was an I’ve-been-abducted-by-aliens, well then we would act like we were abducted by aliens, but to our dismay there wasn’t any conventions being held that day at all. As we sat there with a now-what-do-we-do mentality, we saw it. It wasn’t a convention per-say but it was close enough Star Trek the Exhibition was being held at the Arizona science center, it was perfect; we would become Trekies! So we got our tickets, waited in line and acted (ok it was genuine) like we were super excited to be on the replica bridge of the Enterprise and the Engineering room and sick bay. We looked at all the costumes and models of different ships and we even took a Star Trek trivia game, we only scored a 68%. It was totally nerdy and way fun. We got our pictures taken on the bridge to remind us of our adventure and left feeling satisfied. Our tickets included general admission to the science center exhibits as well, so we stuck around for a few hours looking at them, and we watched a movie in the planetarium about black holes.

After having our nerd fun we headed back to the train platform. The ride back on the train was basically the same except for this time we stood next to a crazy schizophrenic  women who appeared to be reading a book at the top of her lungs while holding it an inch from her face. After about 10 min of listing to her belting out her book, I realized that she wasn’t reading at all, but making up weird dialog with fictional characters… nuts! Needless to say we were happy to get off the train and head home.

So my experience with the light rail was exciting and interesting. I’ve never really been a fan of public transportation before, and this experience hasn’t really changed my mind. I do like the fact that for about 2 bucks my wife and I can take a ride downtown to try out new things, but that’s about all the use I’m going to give it. It stops a mile north of the airport a mile north east of ASU and ten miles south of my office, so I really have no other use for it. Meh!