I Ride the Greyhound Bus

I've been out of town since Monday evening and my father kiboshed my plans for the weekend so I had to take the bus. I was going to drive into Toronto this afternoon and then go to a meeting and an interview tonight and tomorrow morning and then drive back, return the car and take a bus home on Monday morning. Instead, I bussed it home today and will take the train to Kingston tomorrow and then get a ride to my Dad's farm. He wants to sell some cows and needs help sorting them. Apparently, the very whisper of selling cows makes me drop everything.

I wasn't looking forward to taking the bus. The last bus I took was from New York City. It was one of the single worst experiences of my life, and I swore to myself that I would never take the bus again. Alas, here I was at the bus station at 8:25 in the morning.

I had purchased my ticket online last night and had my reference number ready. I presented it to the ticket agent. He printed up my ticket and asked, "How much did you pay for this ticket online?" I answered, "Sixty-seven dollars." With a cheery grin that only a middle-aged, heavily wrinkled, small-town Greyhound Bus ticket agent could have he clacked away on his grimy keyboard with one finger and informed me that it would have been cheaper to buy the ticket from him, "You would have only paid forty-seven, taxes in."

Since I saw no automatic nice-guy-discount forthcoming, I grumbled, "It would be cheaper for me to pay the $15 cancellation fee and buy a new ticket now!" He lorded a harrumph over me and I took my ticket and left.

Bus stations are the filthiest, nastiest places that infrastructure has created. They have all, surely, never been mopped, windexed, or dusted. What surprises me time and again is simply the patchwork quilt of people that are found there. The man running the cafe was a 300-pound body builder type with a small head. He played a racing car game when he wasn't taking orders. There was a woman, and I use this term loosely, who was giggling like Butthead. A daughter with a face like a catcher's mitt was sitting with her elderly parents. There was a sign which read, "You're going places." It had a picture of two people laughing. It advertised Greyhound's "companion rate" and I wondered how many people actually laugh when they are about to take a five-and-a-half hour bus ride.

The bus was completely full. I was hopeful that it would be oversold and that they would have to haul out another one, but no such luck. I was one of the last people to get onto the bus even though I had waited for more than 90 minutes in the terminal. It's every person for themselves in that kind of situation and I just didn't have the energy or the temperament to bother. I sat beside a middle-aged woman. I had a tiny little bag and she was quick to point out that I could put it in the overhead compartment. She said it as if there was no way that I could have had any experience with something as complex as overhead stowage.

I sat down in my aisle seat and immediately bumped my foot against something to my left. I looked down to find that it was her foot. She had a huge black shoulder bag at her feet. It took up so much space that she had to put her legs into what was clearly my side of the seat. Butthead started murmuring again and I put on my iPod. I wanted to make sure that it was painfully clear that I was not going to talk to anyone around me on this trip. We sat at the terminal for about 20 minutes before we hit the road. As soon as we started moving, the woman tapped my arm and wanted to get into the overhead compartment to get a catalogue. I moved for her and she dug out grocery bag. It contained the Sears Wishbook. Over the next 45 minutes, she leafed though it and I couldn't tell if she was circling all the items that she was going to purchased or if she was circling all the items that she "wished" people would buy for her.

I managed to sleep. I really don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had my iPod. The trip was relatively uneventful, but as we drove through downtown Toronto I took off my headphones. My ears were a little sore and I wanted a break from them. As we passed the new addition to the AGO, Butthead in the back remarked, "That's a funky fresh building!" What would I have done if my batteries had died, or if my headphones had shorted out? Would I have survived the trip if I hadn't been able to cocoon away?

I walked from the bus station to my house and am going to head off to the university for an orientation session. I know that these things are a complete waste of time, but I had better at least make an effort to get involved. I'm going to Grad School and should probably not be a nonchalant as I was in my previous degrees.