We’ll Find It Over the Hill

Anyway, like the diligent consumers we are we didn’t stop there but continued on through one nearly interchangeable room after another, handing over our ID cards and phone numbers in exchange for tours of quasi-functional apartment kitchens, badly outdated cabinet facades, shoddily shampooed carpets and unremarkable window views. We met a variety of characters in our travels including a handsome younger woman with a curious hole in the shoulder of her sweater, a bizarre woman who wore baggy men’s clothing and remained sexually ambiguous throughout the tour, an uncertain temporary employee that decided we should be shown an apartment with another couple we didn’t know and got lost trying to find the model unit and a bewildered elderly lady who lead us down an eerie hallway before trying to unlock the wrong door and had to send us back down the creepy hallway which for a moment I was sure would be cordoned by crime scene tape to hide our grisly murders.

We retired from the expedition, exhausted after these and several other encounters, to the unexpected serenity of a crowded restaurant. As we talked we discussed the window dressing reasons behind the move: Our respective commutes.

Incidentally we just relocated offices at work. Up until last week our main headquarters had been split in half between two buildings roughly a quarter mile removed from each other. We’d outgrown the first location, branched into the second, attempted to make the new place fit the entire staff and finally gave up and picked a new building several towns south of the original location. Technically it’s a longer drive for me in terms of distance: The new building’s location is at a sort of nexus point between Santa Clara, Cupertino and San Jose’s borders. That’s a couple dozen miles further south than the old place in Palo Alto.

But my previous driving options were to take 580 west to 880 via one of the worst bottlenecks in Bay Area traffic and then take the Dumbarton Bridge at a cost of $4 per day to 101 south and then drive up the traffic light-heavy Arastradero whose speed limit is a strictly enforced 25 MPH. Oh, and the two schools near the old building started their days at the same time my shift began which meant I was constantly battling hordes of crosswalk-crowding adolescents and their SUV-clad soccer moms. My other option, which I went with as the lesser of two evils, was a back route over the hills via highway 84. 84 is a winding, meandering two-lane road that skirts steep canyon cliffs and eventually dumps out onto 680, which I’d take south to Mission Boulevard and join the mass of people squeezing from the spacious 680 into a short stretch of surface streets through Fremont’s Warm Springs district and onto 880 south which I’d quickly abandon in favor of the parking lot that perpetually resides on 237 west. After nearly forty minutes of waiting to travel less than ten miles I’d find myself on 101 north, having effectively circumnavigated the Bay where I’d dodge a bit of traffic by using Shoreline Boulevard and cut over to Arastradero via El Camino Real, where the same setbacks applied regardless of the direction I had come on 101.

My commute, therefore, was a steady two hours and change on a weekday and a minimum of an hour and twenty minutes without traffic. One way. Coming home was usually not quite as bad and I could make the trip in just under two hours (I could skip the back route over the hill and go directly via 580 east due to my longer hours putting me on the road behind most of my fellow bedroom-community cattle). Either way I was looking at approximately four hours per day, three times a week and another two, maybe two and a half hours on a weekend shift.

Via simple serendipity my new commute has me following the same path up to 680 but then I pass the Mission exit and keep on trucking, down past the 880 interchange, until 680 becomes 280 south and then just past the 101 and a few exits beyond downtown San Jose I take the Lawrence Expressway exit and get on Stevens Creek Boulevard for half a block before I arrive at my work. The distance is greater but traffic on 680 is a steady clip most of the way, even the worst slow-and-go on 280 lasts for at most ten minutes and the result is a door-to-door travel time that has been averaging an hour and forty minutes in the morning and about an hour and ten minutes in the evening, usually regardless of what day it is.

All of which is a long way of saying the move at work has unexpectedly benefited me as far as my commute is concerned. As we ate our haphazardly prepared food we talked about what we had seen. This was supposed to be one of several expeditions to look at our various options, half to be centered where Friday’s took place and the other half focusing on the South Bay closer to my work. The ambiguity about our final location was based on several factors: Obviously the Tri-Valley area where we looked on Friday is just over the hill from where we live now which means a less drastic change: Social arrangements we’ve been accustomed to for approaching five years now (seven if you count our journey into the dark heart of that burning vista, a place of torment and bile from which only one thing crawled still alive: This site) are more likely to remain in place, Nikki’s employment would not need undergo a drastic upheaval, etc. But at the time we also thought it might not be sufficient to alleviate the pain of my daily excursion to work. After all, as the car drives the Tri-Valley is a mere twenty minutes from where we live now.

But what we didn’t anticipate was the move at work being so beneficial to my commute. Now all of a sudden those extra twenty minutes or so (maybe more depending on how close we end up to a 680 on-ramp) could have a pretty significant impact. My main goal in all of this talk of moving has been to get my average commute under an hour one way. A significant portion of the morning commute for me is getting from our house to roughly the area we were in looking for apartments. Starting from that point would probably get me to work in a little over one hour. Getting home would probably be slightly less, maybe 45 minutes.

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