First day of my longer commute

Today I took my first shot at commuting to the new office using only public transportation and my bike. I ride a neon yellow(ishgreenish) fixed gear bike that I got when I started commuting by bicycle last year, riding the only 2.5 miles or so to ClickMotive's location. Now that we've been acquired by Dealertrack and moved to the Galleria, the commute is a bit more complicated. I ride about a mile down to the D.A.R.T. light rail station, take it about 10 miles south to Forest Lane where I get out and take a combination of bike trails and roads for about 6 miles to the office.

This morning, I exited one exit too early, took a wrong turn, managed to bike down to the station I should have exited, then took another wrong turn, which took me up to Spring Valley, which is probably a better road than Alpha Road, the one I had planned on. My commute in took about 1 hour 20 minutes. My badge didn't yet have access to the showers I had counted on, which was a major negative, one I'm hoping to never repeat. I'm also hoping I didn't greatly offend my co-workers, as all I could do was paper towel off and re-apply deodorant, as well as change clothes. This was my normal routine at the old office, but 2.5 miles is a lot different than 6.

My route home was using the crummier road, with even more potholes and fewer nice houses, but took the better of the two bike trails, and I was able to get to the station near my house about 1 hour after I left, with still a couple wrong turns, though nothing as time consuming as this morning. I'm thinking I can keep total commute time to about 1 hour, which was feeling like my undetermined maximum allowable time to contemplate doing this regularly.

The exercise is great, having the showers means I can leave the moment I finish letting Dexter out in the morning, and if I commit and get a monthly or yearly pass, which I can use pre-tax dollars to buy, I'll be saving noticeable amounts of money, plus wear and tear on the vehicle. However, being even farther from home, making it even harder to get my lovely wife to come pick me up in emergencies, is a significant challenge, as is the fact that I'd be averaging 2 hours daily commute time, which is 4 times what I was used to.

I drove in on Monday, and it was a total of 1 hour, roughly 30 minutes each way. Since this is the lowest traffic week of the year, I may need to gauge how much traffic affects those two times. My assumption is that my commute time by train and bike will not vary much, as I am the slowest vehicle on the street currently, and cannot fathom that traffic will slow me down even more, not to mention the bike trails won't have that kind of traffic, and the train isn't affected by it either.