Policía?
With the new school semester about to start, and people going their separate ways, I invited Fiona and Allison to come up and visit me here in Plano. They came up on Wednesday evening. Allison blogged about it already, but a night like that requires more than one account. It's worth it.
Chad and I already planned on going to IKEA soon, and also we talked about riding the DART train to downtown Dallas, just for the mass transit experience and to check out downtown, because it's actually pretty cool. So that our guests would not miss out on the glory of IKEA, we decided to go that night. The place is just insane. I'll save the details because we've since been back twice, and it deserves its own post. I will, however, note that the book case we made was able to fit in Chad's Civic, but only with a little TLC and careful positioning.
We took the book case back the apartment, changed, then headed to the train station around maybe 10pm. I was the only person to have any cash, but that was only because I had just been the the ATM the night before; we twenty-somethings like to fully embrace the idea of a cashless society. As such, I had only $20s. The "all-day" tickets cost $2.50 each. They have these wonderful ticket-dispensing machings. You use the screen the select what you want, enter the money, and it gives you the tickets. Our total was only $10 so I got back change--nine Sacagawea dollars and one Susan B. Anthony dollar. I let Allison put them in her purse.
The station we were at had an inside area that also presumably had restrooms, but it was locked. Fiona, of course, desparately needed to use it, and I could have benefited from a pit stop myself, but alas! We boarded the train, tickets in hand, but there's no one to check them. We could have ridden for free. A schematic map above Fiona's head showed the stops along the way, but she couldn't see them. The next stop along the way looked just as deserted as the first one; clearly its bathroom would also be locked. The Mockingbird station is about at the half-way point, at least with regards to stops. The stops downtown, however, are more frequent, so it was actually quite a bit down the line. Allison and I insisted to Fiona that we could just get off at Mockingbird and she could use the bathroom there, since we knew it to be not in the middle of nowhere. "Is it the next stop?" "Uh, it's coming up." Eventually Fiona realized that we weren't even beginning to be close to Mockingbird and she needed to go NOW. At the next stop, we all ran off the train and started off for the bathrooms. We had to run across the tracks, then down a sidewalk under a street, then across part of a parking lot. The area with the bathrooms was, of course, locked, but there was a cleaning lady in there. Fiona, now even more frantic, got the attention of the lady and gestured wildly towards the bathroom doors. The lady opened the door and asked, "Policía?" Fiona gestured again and the lady let her in. We all stood outside laughing.
We then ran back to the train station and waited for another 15 minutes on the next train. We rode it all the way down to the West End station. Surely we could find a place with food there, right? Wrong. We walked for quite a ways, then found some Italian place that was open. We walked in, Fiona used the restroom, and the rest of us realized that it was, at least at that time of night, just a bar. So we continued on. We finally came to Hooters at 11:40; they close at midnight. I had never been to one before and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. My face was in a near permanent smile. We got some food then headed back to the station. We sat around for about 20 minutes, goofing off and taking pictures.
At this point, the story turns dark. Some local guy asked us from across the tracks if we were waiting on the train. He informed us that we missed the last train and that now it was "taxi time"! We, embarassed, hurried to look at the departure schedule. We missed our train by about five minutes. Rarrrr!
What to do now? My idea was to start walking north while we came up with a solution. At least we would be heading the right direction. And so north we walked, passing several downtown stations along the way. It's amazing just how desolate downtown is at 1am. We saw only a few other people, and most of those were cleaning crews. Chad called one of his friends, who happened to be fairly near, but was also fairly drunk. We made it to an intersection just in front of Highway 75, which was elevated above. Chad got hold of another friend and she agreed to come rescue us. Unfortunately, she lives even farther north than we do and couldn't be there for at least another half hour; plus she didn't know the area where we were. To help her, we walked under an overpass, which also functioned as the roof for a homeless man apparently, to a very untraveled exit.
There were grassy areas on both sides of the exit; one was obviously better maintained, and thus we chose it. While sitting there, I was bitten by some mysterious insect, possibly an ant. I noticed sprinklers in another grassy area, but didn't see any reason to worry. After a few minutes, I heard a gurgle of water near my feet and we ran across the street as the water began to spray. The other side of the road had many, many ants, and I have many, many bites. We hung around there for a while longer and Chad's friend showed up in her Cavalier. Much thanks to Samantha for getting us at 2:30 in the morning. We crammed in and she took us back to the train station, where Chad then took us back to the apartment. And that's the end of that story.
On an unrelated note, we want to appologize for the recent dearth of new content on Luceo. I would also like to further point out that Luceo Magazine is the most luceo-y site on the internet, and that those bastards at Luceo Systems can suck it. They don't even know what the word means. "Luceo" is a verb, not an adjective.