I like the whole idea of MEHVA, an organization of King County and Metro employees working to preserve Seattle/KC’s transit heritage by restoring and maintaining vintage transit vehicles. I know in previous blogposts, I’ve frequently passed myself off as a spoiled princess who only likes to drive. In reality, I’ve lived in several areas where taking public transport was the most convenient way to get anywhere, and managed to subsist on trains and busses for over half my short life.

Seattle has not been one of these areas. Nevertheless, I’m fond of seeing its busses on the streets, especially the ones that are two busses stuck end to end (they didn’t have those when I was a kid). It pleases my cold and stony heart to no end to know that coaches dating back to 1938 can still be found in good working order, and that they are occasionally taken out on the streets for a quick jaunt.

MEHVA (pronounced “mee-va”) is run by volunteers and lives mostly off donations. (This may explain why no one ever returned any of my phone calls.) I had heard that the Santa Lights tour was their biggest “thing”, so I figured I would pony up the five bucks and see what sort of thing I got.

Unfortunately what I got was a huge yawner. We saw some great lights, but they were on houses that were all over town, so there was more time spent in the traveling than in the looking. While traveling, I could not help but notice that most people in Seattle don’t decorate for the holidays. Obviously, I’m making a snap judgement here, and should instead say that most people along the bus route do not decorate for the holidays. Which begs the question, why is this tour so popular? (There were three busses full of people.) And how to they figure out the route?

When we finally got to the Olympic Manor neighborhood, we appeared to be only halfway through the alleged 2-hour tour, which put us at an hour behind schedule, since it was 9 o’clock. This is where things started to get interesting.

Picture a narrow, winding Seattle street.

Now picture cars parked on both sides of the street.

Now picture yourself driving a standard car down this street (I’m already peeing my pants with this picture).

Now picture our bus driver negotiating the narrow route. With a bus. Actually, with two busses, one stuck on the end of the other.

That, right there, was worth my $5. Forget the rest of the tour. We got an interesting lesson in bus driving, right there. One of the volunteers had to hop out and fold the side mirrors on all of the cars inwards, so we wouldn’t bump any of them. Then he stayed out to direct, and the bus moved one inch at a time down and around the hairpin turn to the bottom of the hill.

Where it stalled.

After about half an hour of turning the key and pumping the gas, the driver got it started for exactly 2 minutes, before it stalled again. By now, due to the behavior of the vehicle, the experts had figured that the most likely reason for the stall was that it had run out of gas.

In other words, someone had (allegedly) been siphoning gas out of the vehicles while they were parked at the depot. The coaches’ fuel gauges were nonfunctioning, so no one had noticed. (When you learn to fly, student pilots are taught to stick their hands (or a stick) into the fuel tanks to ascertain for themselves how much fuel there is. Right now I was wishing that the MEHVA volunteers had been taught a similar trick.)

There was a flurry of chatter on the radios, and the two other busses turned around to come rescue us. Along the way, a second bus failed and had to pull over on I-5 to await rescue itself. I slumped lower in my seat, wishing the earth would swallow me whole — I had sweet-talked a couple of friends into coming along the trip with me. I had promised them plenty of christmas cheer but I’d left out the part where we were going to be stranded for an extra 90 minutes after the tour was supposed to be over.