Megan walked in at 5:33 PM.
It’s 2.3 miles from our house to the Mountain View Transit station which takes 12-13 minutes to bike, plus some time to lock up and then we each still have to tag on with Clipper Card. The 5:57 North bound Baby Bullet arrives at 4th and King at 6:51 PM, and it takes 26 minutes to get from 4th and King to Fort Mason via Uber, assuming no wait for the pickup. Making the 5:57 PM train is basically a requirement to arrive by 7:30.
We left at 5:43. Actually Megan did, I was half a minute behind since I had to go back and get the second headlight. Megan wore her orange dress from Mexico, which she looks great in, but unfortunately it got caught in her back tire before we even past the lumber yard on our street. That alone cost us almost a full minute. Add this to the 10 minutes it took her to get ready and I knew it was going to be close.
At 5:52 or 5:53 the North bound past us while we were on Evelyn. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘we still have a half mile. It’s really close’.
I looked back and decide to go for a breakaway. I though, ‘I can get ahead and find a bike rack for two and prepare the space so the bikes don’t get tangled up.’ This can sometimes take whole minutes to sort out so it had the potential to save significant time. ‘By the time I’m prepared to receive the second bike Megan will have caught up’. Unfortunately rounding past the last building with the station coming into view, I saw the tracks were empty. ‘The train is gone.’ I thought, ‘We missed it.’
The next scheduled train isn’t until 6:05, plus its a local, so we wouldn’t get to SF until 7:06. Even with a zero wait time, we’ll be a minimum of 2 minutes late. And to make matters worse, the 2.3 mile sprint left us both sweaty and given that the local we would now be on stops in Sunnyvale, we could have strolled down at a leisurely walking pace from our house and had time to spare.
Well, there wasn’t much else to do at that point except wait for the next train.
5:58
Jon to Megan: “Damn it, I think that was it, the one that past us. It seems like it left a minute early.”
Megan to someone nearby on the platform: “Has the Baby Bullet already gone?”
Guy on the platform who looks like a regular: “No”
Simultaneously I checked my phone and found out that Caltrain actually has real time updates. Train 381 was running 8 minutes late. ‘I wish I would have know about this ahead of time’ I thought. Realtime updates would have saved us from a 2.3 mile breathless sprint. Next time…
The buffer built into the the original schedule will save us in these conditions. Also, we’ll still get to take the express train, and barring further delays the Uber should drop us off right on time.
Intermission
[ Dinner was very nice. I had gratin provencal with grilled polenta and Megan had spinach ricotta ravioli. We had an excellent table, great food and service, and an overall very fun evening. ]
I requested the uber as we were walking off the pier at 9:03 PM. Luckily by 9:05 our driver picked us up.
We were in a Honda Fit driven by an elderly Asian woman. I remember thinking, “Great, we’re screwed.”
The local #194 leaves San Francisco station at 9:30 with the next #196 train not for 70 minutes afterward at 10:40 PM. Best case, we’d be back to mountain view station at 10:44, worst case, just a few minutes before midnight.
We once had been lucky with an uber driver racing us to the station to catch a train after i had issued him a challenge to get us there on time and we made it. So I offered this lady a few comments to this effect and to my surprise she stepped on it the whole way there.
We got out by the stadium at 9:28 and ran across the street and through the station, tagged on and then realizing we were going to make it, slowed to a jog once on the platform.
We found some seats near the front and settled in for the ride.
Once back in Mountain View we exited the train and had a more leisurely ride back to the house than on our way to the station.