I flew to California on Groundhog Day to pick up a car; ergo, I am no longer car-free in Austin. What I want to write about here, even though this is supposed to be an Austin-centric category, is the public transport component of that day. And I went all out on public transport, since it was my last day without a car. I would make Bill Murray Groundhog Day jokes if I could think of any, but this was more Planes, Trains and Automobiles…and every other mode of transport.

Took a Lyft to Austin airport and caught my WFH version the Nerd Bird: a direct Alaska Airlines flight to San Francisco. The boarding agent, packing lots of Prince flair, gave each boarding group an epithet corresponding to our letter: C as in Cordial, D as in Debonair, E as in Effervescent. I was group F, which I desperately wanted to be Fabulous, but he broke the parallel parts-of-speech pattern and went with Familiarity. Still, there was something to be found there.

I finally finished Megan Kimble’s City Limits on the plane. It’s a sprawling examination of the highway system in Texas, encompassing too many characters to follow effectively, but while reading on the plane I locked into the epilogue, which talks about the author moving into the (former airport) Mueller development through housing assistance because her journalism salary was so low. She and I have a lot in common, a mutual friend who introduced me to her book and I think her sister teaches at my alma mater, so it was easy to see some parallels. I also read an eye-opening piece on arborglyphs in New Mexico magazine. Only just before landing did I learn I could’ve watched The Wild Robot on the flight; alas, I had no headphones.

Landed at SFO and bolted off the plane because I’d only packed my backpack. I was dressed like a lunatic, with all my bulky clothes on my person, plus that stupid free hat that I picked up at the SXSW volunteer call. I did not know flat-billed ballcaps were structured that way; I had planned to bend the brim the first chance I got. So for this entire adventure, imagine me looking like the worst kind of hipster on the planet, wearing a variety of clothing and none of it appropriate for the weather.

The airport tram runs to a Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) station, where I purchased a Clipper card from a kiosk. I was headed to the Embarcadero on the advice of my sister, partially because I had been there before and knew the lay of the land. Kimble writes about the Embarcadero in City Limits, as an example of what a city can accomplish when citizens unite against a proposed highway which, in San Francisco’s case, would have run along that eastern waterfront.

Instead, they have streetcars running past the ferry building, and the pull was too great, so I finished my empanada and missed my ferry. A friend had texted I should go see the Jimmy Hendrix mural on his former residence in the Haight, but I wandered over to the cable car stop and met with one of the city’s Welcome Ambassadors. I wrote him a positive review, which was responded to later by another Mandy, and rode up to the Mission district, then changed cars, changed again when I got on the wrong one and got in trouble for trying to jump off a moving cable car, and ended up in Ghiradelli Square…which is funny because the chocolates are square. I did the touristy thing, then caught the vintage Kansas City streetcar, which doubles as a guided tour, back to the ferry building…where I missed another ferry by eight minutes.

At this point, I was cold and tired and bored, plus my phone needed charging and my backpack was getting heavy. To recount: a Lyft, a plane, a tram, a subway, a cable car, a streetcar, plus a lot of mileage on foot, carrying my belongings on my back. And now waiting for the ferry, which was operating on its weekend schedule, I realized too late. I was not alone, and a woman commiserated with me even as I helped another find her correct gate.

Finally aboard the ferry, I determined that my Clipper card would indeed work on the Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) train. Halfway across the bay, the rain that had been toying with me all day finally let loose, and I walked the half mile to the SMART station, along a pedestrian/bike path constructed above a busy road, in a torrential downpour. Larkspur Landing looked lovely and cozy, with its little cinema next to the train station, as I huddled under the awning until the doors opened…thankfully, I had caught the weekend’s penultimate train to Petaluma.

I dried out on the train, about an hour’s ride up the 101, and disembarked in downtown Petaluma. I was still a forty-minute walk from my destination, across the 101, so I turned instead toward downtown and picked out my dinner from Petaluma Market. The friend I was supposed to be meeting had pulled over in the rain and stopped for the night, so I called a Lyft to drive me to my hotel, where I ate my salad in the bathtub.

The next day, after a hike in a sacred spot for me, also in the rain, my friend picked me up in the car that was to become mine, at least for a while. We went for a hike in Muir Woods National Monument and, the next morning, returned to SFO to drop her off. I drove away from the airport in a vehicle of my own for the first time in over two years.

So, to recap, on my last day of public transport dependency, I navigated Austin to the Bay Area via Lyft, plane, tram, subway, cable car, streetcar, ferry, train, another Lyft, my own two feet, and finally a personal vehicle. I then roadtripped back to Austin, but that’s another story. Here are some other miscellaneous modes of transport that I admired along my Bay Area route.