Journey: long but uneventful. It still surprises me that a major international airport like Dulles can be devoid of pubic transport links, but a shared van to Washington Union Station worked fine (even if the windows were steamed up so that I think we went past the White House, but I'm not really sure).
It was difficult to locate the ticket sellers for the MARC trains since everything was labelled Amtrak. Eventually I found a machine that was labelled as selling MARC tickets, but when I requested a single to Baltimore the list it returned was only of (expensive) Amtrak tickets, and it didn't actually seem to offer the cheaper MARC ones. So I resorted to asking a human being, even though the sign above her indicated that she only sold Acela Express tickets. And that worked fine. So there's some strange disconnect that I don't pretend to understand between tickets ostensibly sold and tickets actually sold. And people still work better than machines.
The MARC train was very crowded – more like a rattly old bus on tracks than a train as I would recognise one. And their attitude to safety was relaxed: for about half the journey between Washington and Baltimore, one of the train doors was open. When an official passed and noticed it, he raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and pulled it closed. No big deal.
When planning a journey, it is (for me, at least) natural to start with the big steps then consider the smaller ones after. I had assumed that it would be really easy to get from Dulles to the place I'm staying in Baltimore. It would have been if I'd hired a car or a taxi, but public transport was a three stage, three hour transfer. And the place I'm staying is really close to Johns Hopkins University... but not so close to the Armstrong Institute, which is where I'm actually working this week. So today's adventure is going to be working out the local bus network.
It was difficult to locate the ticket sellers for the MARC trains since everything was labelled Amtrak. Eventually I found a machine that was labelled as selling MARC tickets, but when I requested a single to Baltimore the list it returned was only of (expensive) Amtrak tickets, and it didn't actually seem to offer the cheaper MARC ones. So I resorted to asking a human being, even though the sign above her indicated that she only sold Acela Express tickets. And that worked fine. So there's some strange disconnect that I don't pretend to understand between tickets ostensibly sold and tickets actually sold. And people still work better than machines.
When planning a journey, it is (for me, at least) natural to start with the big steps then consider the smaller ones after. I had assumed that it would be really easy to get from Dulles to the place I'm staying in Baltimore. It would have been if I'd hired a car or a taxi, but public transport was a three stage, three hour transfer. And the place I'm staying is really close to Johns Hopkins University... but not so close to the Armstrong Institute, which is where I'm actually working this week. So today's adventure is going to be working out the local bus network.
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