Starhills navigate buses, part XXXIIV

So you’d think that after living here a year (2011-2012), we’d have mastered the bus systems.  If you search far enough back in the blog, there’s an entry around October 2011 about our travails trying to do simple errands - often just get a mile or two from home.  By the end of that year, we’d figured out how to get to point A to point B – mainly by actually walking from point A to point B first, and then seeing which buses went along the route.

This year, things started off auspiciously – after some searching of the nooks and crannies of one of the bus companies' websites, Jon discovered an app that not only listed the next buses for any given stop but also (shockingly!) overlaid the bus routes onto an actual Google map. Score one for the Starhills. Except the app doesn’t work. As in, it often claims there’s no bus arrival data available for a given stop, even as an actual bus glides silently by (electric hybrid, very quiet).

So Nora and I were thrilled upon setting off on yesterday’s shopping adventure (Nora: new fleece; Mommie: new shoes) to see that the app had bus arrival data, and in fact a bus to the shopping center was to leave soon from near our house. Except when we queried the bus driver, he denied that the bus stopped at the shopping mall. As did the next bus driver. Then the app, right before it crashed the iPhone and locked me out for the remainder of the day, told us that a bus we KNOW stops at the shopping mall was coming in 17 minutes. So Nora and I started meandering up the street, intending to get to the next stop to catch that bus – and within five minutes, the bus passed us right by. We walked to the mall.

Things went downhill on the return trip. After waiting at the mall stop for a few minutes, Cousin of Bus That Passed Us By comes along, and we get on. We’d checked the physical bus schedule on the bus shelter, and confirmed that at least hypothetically, Cousin stops in Alcobendas. Except it didn’t. Apparently, there are three different types of Cousins. Cousin A goes to our apartment, Cousin B goes to our apartment but with a slight detour, and Cousin C goes directly to Madrid. We were on Type C.

The upside is that for four extra Euros, we got to see a spectacular sunset over the sierras. And, unlike my past adventures on the local bus system, it wasn’t impossible to understand the bus drivers – mostly because they were telling me simply “no.”