I had to walk to school from kindergarten to sixth grade, bus for 7th and 8th, and back to walking until I got my first car in eleventh grade.
I remember my mother trying to get the school to supply a bus ride for me as I had to cross a five way intersection. No deal. It was a .7 mile walk and uphill about half of the way.
Six years later some little girls moved in next door and the parents bitched and got a bus for them. :mad:
The walk to high school was 1.3 miles, uphill about 90% of the way.
I remember one time in seventh grade I was not feeling well and went to the nurse. They called my mom but she said she could not come right then, she was busy at work, but if I wanted to start walking home I could and she would keep an eye out and pick me up. She never picked me up. I walked two and half miles home. At least it was downhill.
When I started high school, my parents bought me a bus pass so I could get to school. It was two buses away.
After a while, I got bored with waiting for the second bus every morning, and started to walk rather than wait for it. Then I figured out that if I walked the first bus route as well, I could get rid of the bus pass altogether. I made a deal with my parents that they’d just give me half the bus pass money if I walked every day (I thought I got ripped. It should have been ALL the bus pass money. But I digress…)
Google Maps tells me it was 2.4 miles. I love walking…
Elementary - 0.2 miles (seemed shorter than that even)
Middle / Jr. High - 1.7 miles (that was a really long walk in the winter - arrived covered in ice quite often)
High School - 1.2 miles (that was a long walk as well until I discovered friends who could drive!)
I checked = Elementary school was only about .4 miles. I walked that all the time, fairly flat.
Jr High - 1.2 miles, it was uphill both ways. I lived in a valley town; my parent’s house was on one side, school was on the other side of the valley. Snow? Minnesota. I also played violin, so I dragged that everyday, too. I remember the kids that lived across the street could take the bus so the cutoff was probably right around 1.2 miles. I snuck on the bus like I belonged a few times, but it was so crowded the driver would only allow kids who were on the list on it.
My middle school was 1.63 miles away. However, it was nine acres of woods was part of that.
My high school was maybe 2, just checked, 1.30 miles away, a better walk because it passed the Sparkle Market where I could buy my Bazooka Joe for the day. Good times.
1 km here. But, what the hell is up with the way they space bus stops now? I get stuck behind the bus and see that the stops are so close together that people waiting at different stops are talking with each other. Sometimes they’re so close the bus almost overlaps its stopping locations. Are they trying to save physical activity for gym class, so they can cancel it to save money?
At least you had school. We were marched to the boat yard and forced to scrape barnacles for 12 hours a day. The only food we were given was what we could pry off the hulls. The only water: puddles.
I never walked to school. Elementary was only 1.4 miles, but it was a street that I wouldn’t walk even now as an adult. We has several neighbor kids that we carpooled with. I would ride my bike sometimes when I got a little older, but it involved going way out of the way to avoid the traffic and find some sidewalks. Middle school was beyond walking distance, and high school was a half hour drive.
When I was a little kid, I rode the bus until I was in third grade, then I walked one block to school. When I was in fourth grade, we moved, and I had to walk or ride my bike roughly a mile to school. The high school was even further, about 1.5 miles from our house, and I usually walked to and from school. We moved to a different town between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, and I continued to walk to school all through high school. It was exactly one mile from our front door to the high school. It wasn’t uncommon for me to walk home for lunch in my senior year, since I had one of those “senior schedules” that allowed more than two hours in the middle of the day.
My senior year I also worked at a local radio station. We had only one car, and I had to go to work at 5 a.m. on Sundays, so I had to hoof it. Google tells me it was about 2.5 miles one way to the radio station.
Weather simply wasn’t a consideration – that’s what coats, gloves and hats were for.
My high school was almost exactly a mile away according to Google Earth. A mile is no big deal, except when it is -35C and you are improperly dressed because you are trying to be one of the cool kids.
Anyway, we were poor and our parents were forced to buy us the cheapest runners which happened to be made of plastic, essentially. My friend stepped off the curb and flexed the shoe in such a way that the toe box basically exploded and shattered in to a dozen pieces. He had to walk the rest of the way to school with his toes hanging out. Pretty funny.
I had to ride the bus home, which took about an hour, we were so far out in the country. Then we had to walk a quarter of a mile carrying 50 pounds (it felt like) of books (or in my brother’s case, a baritone sax), in the Florida heat.
I didn’t walk to my elementary school. It was a fenced-in compound in the middle of one of the worst parts of town… as it was, we got a great view of the hookers standing outside the strip joint in the middle of the day as we were bussed in and out, and it wasn’t unusual to find crumpled up tubes of modelling glue and the odd used condom in the schoolyard.
It was many years later that I realised that they didn’t want us lying down in the grass at recess because there might have been syringes lurking on the ground. Gulp.
After that, the 2 mile walk to high school was a breeze no matter how bad the weather got or how uphill the route was.
In kindergarten and first grade I was supposed to walk to and from school according to the city. We lived on a highway with no sidewalks and only a couple houses near us. It was miles to the school. School buses passed the house on the way to school. After two years of mother attending meetings the city allowed the bus to pick me up, but mother had to send a check every week for the driver or I couldn’t ride. I had to walk 7 blocks from a babysitter’s house for 5 years. The days I had band were the worst. I had to carry my fully loaded book bag, the lunch box, the coronet case, and the music stand. Does that sound over loaded. It was, and in winter I traveled by skating the instrument in front of me like I was curling. The lunch box and book bag did the same thing. I don’t think any kid should be in either of those two situations.
That reminds me of when my parents forced my brother to take up violin in the sixth grade. He used to complain about having to lug it to and from school. (.7 miles and no hills, mind you.) Back then, we didn’t have much else to carry other than the occasional text book and our Pee-Chee, which is a folder for your papers, in case you don’t know.
Now that I think of it, my brother and his friends surely took a shortcut that I either wasn’t allowed to take or didn’t know about at the time. Probably shaved that .7 mile in half. Still, while carrying a violin, it must have been an awful slog!
My father dropped me off at school (it was on his way to work) and I walked back. Google Maps gives it as 0.43 miles. I always thought it was less than that. No hills, though.
Looks like it was about 0.7 miles for me too. There were a couple of hills through a park, and being in Toronto it did get wintry, but the combination of hills + winter meant that we could turn the hills into ice slides and at least have a little fun as we trudged back and forth.
I was bussed when I lived in Korea but it was about a mile walk to the bus stop and in first grade, a motorcycle actually ran over me and broke my foot. After that, I was walked to the bus station. Once I was back in the states, I continued to ride the bus, for about 4 months, until the bus driver kicked me off for being disorderly. At that point I rode my bike to school, about 2 miles, but it was still faster then the bus and I was able to deliver papers on my way to school and earn extra money. So I kept riding my bike to junior high, 3 miles. Unfortunately, the high school was too far away especially after football or track practice so I was dropped off on my dad’s way to or from work until I got my own car.
