10/25/12: Endeavour and TAP come to L.A.
The Science Center is now accepting school group reservations to visit Endeavour. The reservations are free, timed, in short supply (for now), and require an exact head count of kids and adults to be provided to staff within seven days of the trip date.
Expect to stroll about prow and wings for forty to sixty minutes, to scrutinize all manner of space age equipment removed from the interior, and to listen to sure-to-be-excellent educational presentations from Science Center staff.
Don't expect to touch one of the wings, or to go inside. Sorry. Your class smuggler-of-snacks will have to smear bits of peanut butter on the altimeter of a less exalted ship.
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That certainly wasn't us you saw cheering the change from the sidelines, but TAP has come to the LACMTA rail system, whether we much wanted it to or not. A few details specific to TransitPeople, and likely irrelevant to most everyone else:
• We can still pay with cash on bus-only trips.
• For rail trips, teacher-leaders will need a class set of TAP cards, and can visit this online interactive map to locate a sales outlet.
• The TAPs can be loaded with day passes, or with cash stored value. If you're riding one Blue Line to and from Long Beach for an Aquarium visit, stored value is what you want. If you're riding several trains to Exposition Park, a day pass is cheaper.
4/24/12: Expo Line opens on April 28 ...
... and MTA finally has the schedule posted. Expo Line will take twenty-six minutes to wend its way from 7th Metro to La Cienega and Jefferson. The Farmdale and Culver City stations are slated to open this summer.
The less-than-cheery bunch above is shown waiting for a tardy 204 after a tour at USC. Our groups have traveled to Exposition Park aboard the 204 and 754 on Vermont, the 81 on Figueroa, the 40, 42 and 740 on King, the 45 and 745 on Broadway, the 102 on Exposition, the 81 on Figueroa (more often than anyone can remember), the 550 and Silver Line on the Harbor 110 Transitway, and have even shuttled here on the Pueblo Del Rio and King East DASH.
But we've never taken the train, as much as we would have liked to. There wasn't a train to take.
At last, now we can. L.A.'s latest choo-choo will allow us to book Exposition Park trips for upper grade classes too large to ride on a bus, as well as schedule visits for groups of teacher-leaders who want to chaperone several classes to the Natural History Museum or Science Center on the same day. We'll probably start booking trips aboard Expo Line shortly after it opens.