We all know the difficulty of learning the Madison bus routes as a freshman. Knowing which bus to get on, where it goes, and when to get off. Most of the time freshmen figure it out pretty quickly and with ease, but not without help.
You know you’re on a bus full of freshmen when everyone is clutching a cell phone displaying Google Maps. Once they realize they’re on the wrong bus, most people have the confidence and security to immediately request a stop and shamefully step back off the bus. But such was not the case with freshman Andrew Walker.
“I originally wanted to just take the 80 bus over to Southeast Campus so I could meet up with my friends from Sellery. We wanted to try and get into the Sencha Tea Bar on State Street to do some real partying,” said Andrew, “so I waited at the Observatory and Elm stop. When the bus came, it had a 2 on it. ‘Okay,’ I said to myself as I got on, ‘that’s weird, but maybe it’s just the second 80 bus out on the route.’ Something seemed off, however, when the driver yelled at me that I needed to swipe my bus pass as I got on. The 80 lines are supposed to be free, but I knew better than to mess with those Madison bus drivers, so I used the pass I found on the ground a couple days before.
“I rode on for a few blocks and was a bit confused when I had to transfer onto a bus line called Van Galder. But I still didn’t worry because I trust public transit implicitly and didn’t wanna look like a noob with a navigation app.
“After about an hour of riding on the bus, I began to have some doubts. We had been driving on the interstate for some time and I know Lakeshore is far, but I still felt that I should have arrived in Southeast Campus by now. I knew something had gone terribly wrong, however, when, after about 4 more hours of driving, we arrived at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Shuffling off the bus with the other passengers and looking around, it finally dawned on me: I had not been on the 80 bus after all.”
Thinking that he could save some time, instead of hopping on the return bus Andrew attempted to take a flight back to Madison. This proved to be his final mistake, however, as he accidentally booked a plane to Madison, Alabama and is now a transfer student in the University of Alabama.