Archive for May 29th, 2024
Hullabaloo, too
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a ‘get some exercise day’ once again, and a humble narrator executed his now familiar trope of walking to the T light rail station and then heading towards the center of things here in Pittsburgh. There’s a fair amount of maintenance work being performed on the service and the transit people are rerouting the T’s through a largely shuttered facility downtown called ‘Penn Station,’ pictured above.
The drill is to debark the light rail unit you arrived in, cross a street, and then board a shuttle bus. Said bus carries you to two stops away, where you then debark the bus and head down into another light rail station to catch a T, which then travels to the terminal stop on the other side of the Allegheny River nearby the Sportsball stadiums.
The shuttle bus and the T make all the usual station stops along the way, as you’d imagine.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Penn Station sits alongside one of Pittsburgh’s ‘Busways,’ which are roadways whose occupancy is singularly restricted to mass transit, municipal, and emergency vehicles. Across the street is what used to be the actual ‘Penn, or Union, Station’ – as in the Pittsburgh HQ station of the Pennsylvania Rail Road company. This beautiful structure, clad in terracotta, has been converted over to luxury residential usage, unfortunately. There’s an Amtrak station alongside of it which now carries the passenger rail slack, but in the past I’ve described the station as looking like a Soviet orthodontist’s office and I’m sticking with that.
After my last long walk went down in flames due to dehydration and a sudden pall of infirmity, as detailed a couple of weeks ago, a humble narrator was determined to push the envelope a little bit on this one to explore the ideation that either it was a temporary thing or that there’s something wrong with me.
As it turned out, that episode seems to have been a one time thing. Yay.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, I felt absolutely top notch for the entirety of this walk, despite the fact that it was about three miles longer than the one which ended with me in bed at 9:30 p.m. feeling sick and old.
The weather was definitely on my side this time around – middle 70’s, with a fairly low dew point, and a steady breeze. The light was absolutely glorious on this particular afternoon, and instead of getting on that shuttle bus, one randomly decided to leave transit behind and get with the scuttling.
Back tomorrow with more.
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