Achtung Metrolink

After my night in the Wigwam Motel, I checked out and caught the bus into downtown San Bernardino. It was hard not to feel pity for this place. You'd hardly know it was one of the largest cities in California. The edge of downtown felt more like one was coming into a grimy town in the Nevada desert.

The downtown of course had plenty of old buildings that were shuttered. I walked past an old dark department store, marked by a historic plague. The old grand entrance was sealed with an iron gate, behind which were recent yellow page phone books that had been thrown over the fence in plastic bags, oblivious to the obvious fate of the store. It seemed a perfect image for the city.

Nevertheless there was a Starbucks in the vicinity, which I located using my smartphone. I whiled away a couple hours working there in the middle of the day. It felt as if everyone else there was preparing resumes. It was hard to imagine that we were so close to Los Angeles. It felt like a thousand miles a way.

In the mid afternoon, I folded up my laptop and hoofed it with my backpack under the freeway to what I thought was the Metrolink station, since I planned on taking the commuter train back westward towards L.A.

Unfortunately I hadn't quite done my trip research thoroughly enough. The station was not the Metrolink station but rather the old Santa Fe depot, now the Amtrak station. The Metrolink station was next door, a couple hundred yards away, and I arrived at the Amtrak station just in time to see the Metrolink train pull away into the distance.

At that moment I had one of the moments of scolding myself. It's exactly the kind of lesson one learns from traveling---never assume anything. In this case, I had simply looked at the map and figured the station served both Amtrak and Metrolink. In fact they were separate stations. As I've traveled the world over the years, I've been stung by this kind of mistake repeatedly. It seems to never fail---when you assume, you get burned.

But there's another travel lesson I've learned, which is just to go with the flow. There was no point in fretting. I've waited for days on end at the most godforsaken stations behind the Iron Curtain in this way, so I knew I could take it. In this case, it was only an hour to the next train after all. It gave me a chance to go inside the Amtrak station and sit at the ancient classic lunch counter, where I had a cup of coffee and used the free wi-fi to continue the day's work. From time to time, I turned around at the counter to admire the waiting hall, wondering what souls had come through the station over the years.

The hour went by very quickly, as it always does when I sink into work, and all in all I was glad that I'd missed the earlier train.

But this was San Bernardino, after all, so I didn't get off that easy. Unfortunately there was another lesson to be learned. When at last I walked over to the Metrolink station and stood in line to buy a ticket at the only working machine, the process consumed all the remaining time until the train arrived. At one point I thought I might miss this train as well.

It seemed as if every person needed to press at least twenty buttons to buy a ticket, each press marked by a loud beep. It was probably the most cumbersome mechanical ticket-buying experience I'd ever experienced.

Then all us were made to file single-file onto the platform, showing our tickets to a scowling security agent as we did. Finally to board the train we were made to walk past a county sheriff deputy wearing dark sunglasses and holding a panting German Shepherd on a leash. It felt as if we were convicts on our way to prison.

I hadn't learned that kind of travel lesson in a long, long time. Not since I was in Eastern Europe before the fall of Communism, I think.