Yesterday was a bit of a challenge. It involved:
- picking up a laptop in Northcote Point that had been loaned out to a customer,
- a scheduled day visit to St Mary’s School (my aforementioned “school in Northcote”)
- a site visit west of Highbury,
- dropping off a repaired laptop in Milford to a site I’d never visited before.

This meant during part of the day I was carrying three laptops including my own.

I ended up tackling it by catching the usual bus + train into town and picking up a Cityhop car from the Downtown carpark. With that I completed the Northcote work, dropped all my bags off at St Mary’s and returned the car with just one minute to spare on the booking (phew!). Back to the school by bus for the day, then, after leaving one of the laptops stored at the school to lighten the load, I shared a ride with one of the staff to Highbury.

From there the Maxx Journey Planner told me to catch the 5pm 555 from Highbury to Smales Farm and switch to an 863X Express bus to Milford. I had decided not to use another Cityhop booking as it was peak traffic and involved going to the CBD and back in that traffic, making it too pricey for this particular job.

Besides, I thought it would be a good challenge to try to get to a new location I’ve never been to before by bus. And a challenge it certainly proved to be, with a few lessons to go along with it.

The 555 was quite late so I’d missed the express. My cellphone had run out of juice too so I was cut off from Maxx’s website, text service and call centre to figure out the next step, so I rushingly checked the at-station timetables. Too rushed – I caught the wrong bus on the Milford loop (803/804) and ended up in Takapuna instead, losing half an hour.

Eventually I made it by more carefully studying the at-stop timetables in Takapuna and catching what I recall to be an 839 bus and having a longer walk at the end. On my way back by fluke I successfully navigated a back street and an alleyway to the right stop for the last Milford loop bus of the day back to Smales Farm, and got home from there.

Lessons learned today:
- If you’re going to push your cellphone by using it for mobile e-mail, and Bluetooth+3G for mobile data, charge the battery every single night.
- Don’t rush reading timetables.
- Study route options for an area in good time before leaving if it’s in an unfamiliar area!

cityhop · highbury · journey planner · maxx · milford · milford loop · takapuna