Commuters are struggling to navigate campus due to the endless construction and bus route changes. (Charlotte Lao/The Daily Campus)
“Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.” – Jack Sparrow
Sometimes, it’s orange.
Last year, the bus routes were super straightforward. You download the myUConn app, open up the bus tracker and it shows you where every bus is and where the stops are. Most of the stops are clearly marked with what color bus comes your way and the bus GPS tracks itself to give a pretty clear picture of when the bus should arrive.
This semester, due to the endless construction that comes with a growing university, everything has changed.
Instead of my nice, safe red and blue line buses that I can take in the mornings from the W-Lot, I got switched to orange and blue. Blue line is okay for mornings, but as I found out the other day, orange is not. Orange will make me about 10 minutes late if I get on at my normal time. In the morning the bus took a surprise turn to Horsebarn Hill, and though the view is great, the looks I got from my professor as I walked into her lecture late were not worth taking the scenic route that morning.
In the afternoon, however, the orange Line is actually closer to my last class than red Line would have been, so I’m pretty happy to have a shorter walk to my stop.
Here comes the treasure hunt part:
The map says that it should be a shorter walk, but that’s only true if I can actually find the unmarked stop.
Really, they’ve done a great job of getting new signs for all of the bus stops that I’ve seen, except for one. That one happens to be the stop that I so desperately need on my way back to W-Lot, which, for those of you who don’t know, is behind Towers and all the Greek houses. It’s all uphill and for a girl who fights exercise (metaphorically, of course) every chance she gets, the trek is rough.
I’ve started walking all the way down the road to the next bus stop, but knowing that there could be one right in front of me, with no sign, really bothers me. I could be saving all those calories from a horrible death, but instead I have to pick up my backpack and walk.
Eventually, I’m just going to have to ride the bus all the way through and just figure out where it actually stops, or get up the nerve to ask the bus driver where exactly the stop is. Or I could even call the lovely transportation fairies and have them point the way. But until I have the time and courage to do that, I will just have to trudge on.
I’ll let you know when I find my orange treasure, if I ever do. Construction stinks.
Hannah Desrosiers is a campus correspondent for The Daily Campus. She can be reached via email at hannah.desrosiers@uconn.edu.