Ride to Church in Oakland, CA

Today’s complicated ride to church comes to us from TopHat from the Exponent.   TopHat says:

My family lives in Oakland, CA, and we go to church up at the inter-stake center on the Oakland Temple grounds. For those of you who don’t know, the Oakland temple is up in the hills. As a carfree family, the location makes it difficult to get to church, so we usually use a car share, which is like renting a car by the hour. Three hour church (plus extra meetings!) gets expensive, though, so we decided to try out busing to church. Decades ago, the buses used to go straight to the temple on Sundays, but the bus system has cut the weekend service, so we had to bus as close as possible and then walk a mile uphill to the temple. You can see we pass through some fennel.   Fennel grows wild on the side of the road, even in more urban areas of Oakland. It smells and tastes like licorice.   All buses end up in downtown Oakland, so the usual route to anywhere is: go downtown, switch buses and go back out of downtown. That’s what we did. We missed the bus initially and had 20 minutes between buses downtown, so we had time to take extra pictures of the area.

When we left church, the fog had burned off and it was sunny. Even though it took us an hour and a half to go a whole 7 miles, it was actually very bonding and fun for us. I think we’ll do it again.