Two Buses, Four Rides, Yes, Straight to The Door

As many of you know, we don't have a car.  We travel by bus and whatever aka tremping, hitchhiking.  Sometimes it all goes easily, and sometimes it's a bit more complicated.  There is bus service between Shiloh and Jerusalem and Shiloh and Ariel, which has more bus lines to the "Tel Aviv area."

The other day I attended a shiur class at Matan in Jerusalem.  It ended a bit after one bus home and much too early for the next one.  I hate waiting.  So I had to figure out how to get home in between the buses.

I don't like sounding/seeming like a parasite, so I didn't ask/announce that I needed a ride after the shiur was over.  It was a bit annoying watching all the cars pass me; I recognized the drivers from the participants.  But that's the price of being carless.

I lost/wasted a lot of concentration during the class trying to figure out which bus and route I should take back to somehow get home.

I decided to walk to a bus stop that would give me two different options, #4 and #18.  My luck was that I missed a bus.  It passed me on the way.  Then I waited and waited and waited; neither bus showed.  Finally the #4 showed up.  I sat near the driver so I could ask which stop would be the same as for #25 which could take me to a bus stop where cars also offer rides.

That made two buses, since the #25 came pretty quickly to make up for my previous wait.  After a while a car stopped offering to take us to Adam.  Going there wouldn't help, so I asked if they'd drop me off at the machsom, Jerusalem border.  After waiting a short while there, I got a ride to Ofra, then to the Shiloh Junction and finally from there from a neighbor who passes my house on the way to his.

To put it simply, I got a ride straight home, and I even saved ns12.  Thank G-d!