Brooding over my youthful resentments, I revisited one of my most bitter…the fact that I had to walk to school. I have always been certain that this was more than a mile.
So I google mapped it to prove the unconscionable distance a small child was expected to traverse in the cruel cruel seventies before the inalienable right of children to be driven everywhere had been discovered…
it was 7/10ths of a mile. On the map, no matter how much I zoom in, it seems just the shortest little walk.
But seriously, even though it was Virginia, it did sometimes snow, and there really were VERY STEEP hills in both directions!
Mine was .7 miles too. But it was uphill both ways. And it does snow in Minnesota. More importantly, most of the walk was next to the lake and the wind would whip over that lake - on a cold February day it was really cold.
The year after I left elementary school, our street got a bus.
Even though it was more than 50 years ago, back in the last century, my walk to and from primary school was flat, since it was along an old railway line (which went right next to the block of flats that my family lived in, and separated my school from the school playground). And it was less than half a mile. For those worried about the infant Giles being struck down by an express train, the line went to two disused coal mines, and I only saw a locomotive on it once or twice.
(But I if was lucky enough to pick up a lump of coal on that railway line, we used to huddle around it all winter to keep warm).
My middle school was .3 miles away and we weren’t allowed to walk. I actually got yelled at one day for attempting to walk despite the warnings (I was quite the rebel…).
I lived right next to my elementary school the first two years and then a block away the other four. I did once walk home from high school, though, and it was probably a mile or more along two of the busiest streets in my non-pedestrian-friendly city. No sidewalks at all.
If we missed the bus we had to walk. It was probably a mile and a half and it sucked.
On the same note I went by my elementary school today for the first time in years. When I was in first grade I thought that must have been the biggest goddamn building in the world!
Seriously, half a mile?! I would have sworn it was at least three quarters, and I’ve been there in the past few years. Must have been my short little legs. Not to mention the cold wind on the lower half of those legs, since my mom wouldn’t let me wear slacks.
My high school was half-a-mile away. But the really annoying thing was that that all roads didn’t lead there. Checking it on a map, I know I wasn’t mad in thinking it was over a mile of actual walking through the zig-zag of suburbia. Each way. No wonder I found it boring.
When I was in junior high school, we weren’t allowed to wear pants until the rules changed when I was in 7th grade. Public school, California, and not even all that long ago. (was it?)
It was .25 miles to my bus stop. I was the only child at that stop, most years. The bus had to drive past my house to reach the stop, turn around, then go back the way it came from, and pass my house again.
Just checked Google maps.
My elementary school was .7 of a mile, and it was uphill in both directions (more so coming home) thanks to one big assed hill I had to go up and down to get there.
My junior high was 2.1 miles and was only uphill coming home.
My elementary school was 400 metres away. Even so, I was often driven home from school when I was little, as Mom or Dad would pick us up (from after-school daycare) after driving across town from work; although we walked to school. We didn’t consider it far, but I sometimes rode my bike.
When we started going to a different school across town, we took the bus. The first year or two, our bus ride was an hour and a half long :eek: ; we were at the beginning of the route in the morning, and then the bus went all the way out to the western suburbs then all the way back, to cover the whole west end of town. More than once, my poor nine-year-old bladder was sorely tested :o When they finally split the route into two, our ride fell to a half-hour (about 11 km). In unusual circumstances we had to take the city bus, which took about an hour.
In Montreal, my high school was down the block about 500 metres away; but the Big Walk came when I started going to cégep, which was about 2 km away up the mountain. It did me good, though, in that I lost about 20 pounds of baby fat in my first semester.
Word. I took the bus all through elementary and middle school (Elementary and first grade were about two miles away; eighth grade was at a magnet school about eight miles away). I was thrilled when I got to high school, just over a mile from home, and could walk and/or bum rides off my/my sister’s friends.
There were only two times when my parents had any sympathy: One was first semester senior year, when I had a ‘period 0’ starting at 7 AM. The other was on senior skip day. My mother assumed that her dropping me off directly in front of the school meant I would in fact be in school that day. And I was, for the thirty seconds it took me to walk through the school to the student parking lot and get in my friend’s waiting car.
The school that a friend of my dad went to (grade school) required all students to take the bus. His friend lived within one block of the school and still was not allowed to walk. To add injury to insult, the way the bus route was set up, he was first to be picked up and last to be dropped off. So even though school went from (about) 8-3 he had to get picked up at 6 and get dropped off at 5.
My elementary school was also roughly .7 miles from our house but there were no hills. However, I had problems with my legs that made the walk somewhat more difficult than for the average kid. I remember my mom telling me that she tried to get the school to send out a bus for me but no dice. Since she didn’t drive and Dad was at work by then, I had no choice but to walk it. Sixth grade, we’d moved and the new school was probably less than a quarter mile from home but it was all uphill on the way back.
Junior high and high school were right next to each other and were probably about three quarters of a mile away. There was one short hilly spot and a dirt bank about 30 or 40 feet high with a path trampled into to it to be scaled or descended depending on which direction one was headed.
Eldest (who is 8) rides his bike 1.86 miles to school and back (according to Google Maps; the actual route is shorter I think because of cut throughs). Youngest (who is 6) gets to decide whether he wants to take his own bike or ride behind me on my bike. From about January through about March they may also choose to take the city bus as there is no school bus. Thanks to global warming we only rarely have to deal with snow.
Since I don’t have a Dutch driver’s license, they have no choice. But I suppose they may take comfort in the fact that there are no hills in Holland to speak of.
My elementary school (which I attended until the age of 13) was literally across the street from the flat where I lived.
My high school (from the age of 13 onwards) was farther away, but not much. About 10-15 minutes’ walk.
All that time, both for elementary and high school, I always walked to my school.
When I entered university, it was a different proposition: The place was some 6 kilometres away (roughly 4 miles), and it was so absolutely brand new that there were no buses for us first-year students. So, a couple of days I even walked an hour or so to get to it. The rest of the time I mooched a ride with some of the guys who had a car (I only got my driver’s licence at the age of 33) or hitch-hiked.