Bus #84 in Houston

I think bus #84 is my favorite in Houston. It goes to many comforting places: two movie theatres, the Ikea, and the Houston Arboretum.

To be fair, it doesn’t exactly go past the Ikea. It goes instead to the Northwest Transit Center. The Northwest Transit Center always struck me as a lonely, ugly, heartless spot. But then I discovered that you can walk — and there’s a sidewalk the whole way — to the Ikea from there in like 15 or 20 minutes. It’s so nice! And on the way to Ikea, you pass one of the movie theatres.

So you can get candy from Ikea, and look at all the furniture, and then go back and watch a movie and eat popcorn, all in one go, and without having to drive.

If it’s a super hot day, and you don’t want to walk 20 minutes to Ikea, just transfer to either bus #49 or #39 at the Northwest Transit Center. Those two buses will take you to Ikea in about 2 minutes (the third stop).

As long as you bought your bus ticket through a mobile app or through a “q-card”, you don’t have to worry about paying extra money for the transfer. In fact, you have three hours in which to make the transfer.

Before bus #84 gets to the Transit Center (its very last stop), it trudges through all these neighborhoods in Houston. I took that bus a couple of times in November. Some of the streets we passed through were lit up in a splendid burst of golden Christmas lights — it was magical.

After it leaves the city neighborhoods, bus #84 goes zooming out onto a freeway. This freeway is of course packed with cars, and in common Houston standards, is all an ugly succession of concrete pillars and dull asphalt and pollution. But do you know what this freeway is acting as a border to? To a nice, lovely piece of greenery in the city — a large plot of land — miles across and throughout, so I’m sure you could get lost in it and forget the city. This plot of green is made up of Memorial Park and the Houston Arboretum. I’m not exactly sure where one ends and the other begins, but if you get off on the right bus stop on the freeway, you just have to walk about 11 minutes down a side road, and you get to the Arboretum. It’s a “natural” arboretum — so it’s not full of manicured lawns and flowers. Instead, they’ve tried to recreate natural ecosystems — forests in one area, swamps in another. On Saturday mornings, you can get a free guided hike on one of the trails. So I just love the idea of first catching the bus there (so you don’t have to deal with a car or pollute), and then being dropped off on the side of the freeway, and then letting your footsteps take you from the din of traffic to the peace of the park (except not really, because the sound of the cars follows you there), and being all surrounded by nature and people who care enough to volunteer to show you around the trees.

My only complaint about bus #84 is that it comes by only every 30 minutes on weekends. I had to take another bus to get to the Buffalo Speedway intersection where I could board bus #84. Sometimes, the first bus arrived like a minute after bus #84 had already whizzed through. So I’d have to wait a whole ‘nother half hour until the next one arrived.

Sometimes bus #84 is late getting to the stop at Buffalo Speedway. When that happens, the bus driver goes a little beserk, speeding through town, and somehow incredibly managing to arrive at the Northwest Transit Center right on the dot of the top of the hour, or the half hour, so you can run to your transfer bus before they all depart.

One more nice thing about the Transit Center: from it, you can catch a bus all the way out to Hammerly. It’s as far out as the buses go in the northwest direction of Houston, if you ride the bus to the end of its line before it turns back to the Transit Center. You end up in a place that still is all commercial and filled with zooming traffic; but there’s also tracts of trees, and it’s a little quieter. It just feels a little more soft and secluded than Houston proper.