Local Bus and Realities

 There's six spots in my village to be picked up via the local bus deal.  Five of the six don't amount to anything.  The sixth spot....is a curious and entertaining spot.

The village doesn't have a vast number of travelers on the local Wiesbaden bus system....so we only qualify for one single ticket machine.  It's housed in a cubby-hole type covering area, with a dynamic painting of the town's one single church in the background, with a pretty simple wooden bench to sit and rest your weary bones.

For safety and security....there is one single light above the bench.  Necessary?  Well....we don't exactly have robbers or assaults in the village.  It's mostly for folks to find their coins if they drop them while hunting for change to pay tickets with the machine.

The most modern part of this dynamic bus stop?  The new bus arrival system put up around four months ago....telling you the number of minutes before bus twenty-one or bus twenty-two arrive.  It's tied into some modern technology network and tracks the buses in some fashion.  Cost?  I'd take a wild guess that the whole thing was in the range of four-thousand Euro to buy and install.  Necessary?  Well....we had a paper schedule on the wall, and ninety-nine percent of the village would tell you that it wasn't really necessary, but forty-percent would tell you that they feel delighted with this modern marvel of a warning system concerning the buses.

The bus traffic from the village?  Well....there's only three places you go go.  Ninety percent of the traffic likely goes to Wiesbaden....particularly if you are of the ages of sixteen to twenty and without a car.  If you want excitement, partying, beer, and fun.....you pretty much have to leave the village.  If you had the other two directions....it's to go shopping at a grocery or hook up with a S-bahn run to Frankfurt.

The reality for an American is that you get used to bus travel and start to live comfortably without using a car for things.  Yeah, it means you kinda have to watch the schedule.....discuss connections....and run a complicated schedule.  It also means you think a bit over tickets (buying the one-way ticket or the all-day ticket).

If you'd asked me ten years ago about the idea of living without a car....I would have laughed.  Today?  I could almost buy into the idea entirely.  There's some limits....but after a while, you start to accept things and enjoy life without traffic jams or having to look for parking spots.  It's a little thing that you simply accept as being more practical.