A view of the valley in which BYU is situated.
We were at Brigham Young University over the weekend to participate in lots of meetings in preparation for the Jordan Study Abroad program this summer. (Note to all my friends in Utah who I didn't see, which is just about every single one of them: we were there for like 48 hours and our time was not really our own. My apologies.)
We stayed with Jeremy's sister in Lehi. She let us borrow her minivan for quite a few trips down to the Y, but on Monday morning we planned on taking the bus. When we lived in American Fork and our car got totaled (not a very difficult thing to do when it's a Toyota Tercel), we took the bus to Provo all the time. It worked out very nicely, actually. I think I read the unabridged Les Miserables in its entirety while riding the 811 (granted, it was a little awkward during the very moving scenes, and it's possible I cried over a book in public).
Since we were no strangers to taking the bus into Provo, we set out early Monday morning to catch the 811 at the stop just outside Jeremy's sister's neighborhood in Lehi. We had confirmed the location of the stop late the night before - literally about 10 hours ago. So it was a bit disconcerting when, after trekking through the cold, pouring rain for 10 minutes, we couldn't find the bus stop.
There was no sign, where there had been one before. Meanwhile, the time we had budgeted to travel to BYU was slipping away.
We must have looked very awkward standing confusedly in the rain, because a lady pulled over and asked if we needed a ride. I told her we were actually just looking for the bus stop, and she pointed to the place where it should have been. Then she got confused, and said that it had always been there but that now there was no sign.
She said she'd take us to the next covered bus stop, which happened to be the stop in American Fork that we are very familiar with. She even had an empty carseat strapped in her backseat! So we loaded our things, including Miriam, in the stranger's car and drove off to the next bus stop. The really nice lady actually attends the same church congregation as Jeremy's sister, though they don't know each other.
We thanked our Good Samaritan profusely, caught the bus in American Fork, and had a productive morning at the BYU. But it's still a mystery to me: what happened to that bus stop?? How did it disappear overnight, on the very day we were going to be using it? Would the bus have stopped there anyway, even without the sign? Perhaps we'll never know.