Surviving Long Distance Bus Travel
First realize that a Greyhound bus trip is nothing like a plane trip. While at most, you’ll have to change planes twice on a long airline trip, you can expect to change busses many times while travelling on the Greyhound / Peter Pan bus line system. For my own journey this meant boarding a bus in NYC and changing busses in Washingon, DC, LIttle Rock, AK and Dallas, TX. I also had long stopovers in a host of other cities including Richmond, VA and Nashville, TN on my way to Austin, and Mobile, AL, Billoxi, MI and Atlanta, GA on my return trip.
Right about now, you may be thinking, “Cool, by taking the bus I’ll get to see America!” This is not true. You will get to see America’s bus stops, which are, as a rule, located in neighborhoods that are either poor or desolate or both. Which doesn’t make them less fascinating, but I can assure you that staring at the chalkboard schedule for 5 hours in the early morning at the bus station in Nashville because your bus arrived ahead of schedule and cannot yet depart is not terribly interesting or informative.
Which brings me to the second major point you should be aware of about your impending bus adventure. “Schedule” is loosely defined in the world of bus travel. For this, I don’t truly blame the bus companies; the fact is life on America’s highways is unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll get to one of your bus stops early and then be stranded there for hours. At other times, the bus will be running late, so an hour to stretch your legs becomes five minutes. And even worse, sometimes you encounter the unforseen and you miss your connecting bus altogether (in my case, this involved a truck catching on fire and blocking the entire highway at the Texas / Oklahoma border. I woke up at 3am to see flames and sirens and then we sat on the side of the road watching great flocks of grackels drawn to the light for hours as the thing burnt out. By the time we got to Dallas, I had missed my connecting bus to Austin and was stranded with a bunch of Menonites that had had some other bus disaster and had been stuck there for over twelve hours awaiting their own bus connection).
What the two facts we’ve learnt so far mean is that you must both pack efficiently, so that it is easy to move your belongings quickly (and without losing anything) from bus to bus and that you must have with you everything you could possibly need on the bus, because you just don’t know when you’ll be able to get off the bus again.
You may be asking, what do I need on a bus if I’m going to be on said bus for days?
– food (non-perishable please!)
– drink
– painkillers
– any perscription medication you may be taking
– anything you may need for motion sickness
– toilet paper in case the bus bathroom runs out
– ladies, no matter how much you think you won’t have your period while on the bus, trust me when I tell you you don’t want to be stuck without supplies (or finding yourself forced to ask the big man behind the counter at 2am in Mobile, AL to get them for you); just bring your tampons.
– toothbrush and toothpaste
– soap
– cellphone ( or lots of quarters) so you can let people at your destination know if you’re way off schedule.
– change of socks
The third thing you need to know about bus travel is that strangers will talk to you. I don’t care how hardened a New Yorker you are, how big the headphones that go with your walkman are, how awesome you are at snarling at people like Harry Potter’s Professor Snape or how good you are either at pretending you don’t speak English or are deaf – PEOPLE WILL SPEAK TO YOU ANYWAY. And let me tell you right now, I’m really awesome at all of those defense mechanisms (hey, I even know ASL). Amazing. Fabulous. But it was all for naught!
And by people speaking to you, I don’t mean a slightly too-long conversation about their kids complete with pictures. Or too much grousing about the woes of bus travel. Or even constant offers of the supplies they themselves have laid in for the long trip. No. All of that would seem like heaven compared with the tales you’re about to hear. On my little bus adventure, they included a man in his 40s who had just sold all his wordly possession to move to Los Angeles and become a star; a 70-year-old woman who had been an 18-wheel truck driver, until she crashed hers in a snow storm and had the newspaper clippings to prove it and was damn angry her truck company was sending her back home by Greyhound bus; and a kid who had just gotten out of prison possessing only a bus ticket and an extra pair of sneakers in a brown paper bag who named me New York, showed me his suicide attempt scars and talked to me about his dead brother and his desire to be a psychiatrist one day and needed my help to read his bus ticket. And these were the big spectacular stories that I listened to for up to ten hours at a stretch. And it was horrible not because any of these people were frightening, or unpleasant, or even boring (none of them were any of those things), but because they had no one else to talk to and they were pouring all of this hope and rage and misery into me, and hearing confession like this is harder than you think. The bus emotionally exhausted me, and it may well emotionally exhaust you.
Fourth, the bus is always going to be more corwded than you think. I figured, that once my bus got past the busy New York to Washington, DC leg of the trip, there would be an empty seat to put some of my things on. This would be wrong. Pack light. Don’t do what I did and buy an expensive, fragile wedding present that you have to keep on your lap for days. For that matter, don’t even bet on having your one seat all to yourself. On my way back from Austin my bus got pulled over by the FBI and a drug sniffing dog because the back axel of the bus had bent and we were driving with only 3 wheels! We had to get off at a rest stop in South Carolina where we waited for hours for a new bus to come. It was already filled with people though, but we boarded it anyway, sitting three people to seat banks meant for two, and our bus driver sitting in the bus bathroom the whole way to Washington. And even if you don’t meet absurdity like this, be sure that people will overpack (such as the guys headed to Laredo with mirrors featuring religious art strapped to their backs) and that things will perhaps be less comfortable on your bus than you imagined.
If you’re a writer, long-haul bus trips across America are, admittedly, a great source of material. And for me, who has lived most of my life as a gleefully misanthropic New Yorker, it was about six types of culture shock all at once. Certainly, I love having my bus war stories to tell. But the bus is difficult, and it’s cheap for a reason, and all the planning in the world won’t save you from its puckish sense of adventure.
Good luck!
