I Heard it Downtown

This website has been updated sporadically lately for two main reasons. One is that I’m crazy busy with some TFA related projects (see my sister blog, somedayallblogs.wordpress.com). The other reason is that I’ve been working on some longer writing projects. Here is one story that I thought maybe you guys might enjoy, about my bus trip to Washington DC to blog about the Obama Inauguration for a small Ohio Newspaper. Enjoy

The instructions on my ticket confirmation email seemed simple enough. Please bring your photo ID, your email confirmation number, and please get to the Greyhound Station 1 hour before your bus departs. My plan was then to get on my bus, take a nap, read a book, jam to my iPod, and before I knew it, I would be at Union Station in Washington DC. Easy.

But alas, things are not always so simple. I suspect there is quite a bit they don’t tell you about Greyhound Bus journeys.

First, customer service isn’t exactly a priority. Me and my girlfriend (D) arrived at the station for our bus trip at 3:30 AM, and noticed the station was almost completely empty. Apparently, demand for the 4:30 bus from Columbus to DC on a Monday was sparse. Seeing that I was the only one in line at the ticket counter, I walked right up to the front, thinking that I would simply exchange my confirmation number and ID for my tickets, as per the instructions in my email. The Ticket Lady was engaged in a rather lively discussion with a security guard and a bus driver, punctuated by the occasional aaaaaaw shiiiit, and aw no she’s didn’t! I politely coughed to show that I, a customer, needed to be served. The Ticket Lady looked up at me, glared, and continued her conversation.

I turned around and gave my girlfriend a confused look. Was this the right ticket counter? Was it closed? We couldn’t see any sign that would indicate that, and the email did tell us to come to the station at such an ungodly hour. The Ticket Lady apparently noticed, and turned to me. “Sir. I notice you’re getting a little antsy. I am talking right now. Please wait your turn.” She said all of this as if the bus driver was a paying customer, waiting to check his duffel bag and head to Chicago. She then turned back to her friends and said just loud enough for me to hear; can you believe these kids? What are they doing here so goddamned early?[1] I shrugged and sat down by my backpack. I guess this is why Greyhound wanted us to get here so early.

After an uncomfortably long wait, we eventually got our tickets, and sat down next to the door to wait for our bus. “I’m so excited for this trip. Are you excited yet?” D asked me. I had every reason to be. I had managed to talk the editors of my local newspaper to take me off the high school sports beat, and let me cover the inauguration of Barack Obama. Me and D had both worked for the Obama campaign, and the idea of physically witnessing the culmination of our efforts was very thrilling indeed. D had also not been to DC since she was in 8^th grade, and I used to live there, so in addition to witnessing history, I could go visit old college friends and show my girlfriend around what I considered to be my second hometown.

But it was still before 4 AM, and I have a hard time being really excited for anything before 4 AM. “It hasn’t sunk in yet. Ask me if I’m excited once we get to Wheeling” I said. Wheeling was the first stopover on the way to DC. We would then change buses in Pittsburgh, and makes stops in Hagerstown and Baltimore before the end of our journey. I slouched on my little bench, and tried to get a little bit of sleep before our bus was scheduled to arrive in a half hour.

Only the bus didn’t get there in a half hour. Our bus, without apology or explanation, rolled into the stop a fashionable hour and a half late. That’s just another one of the things they don’t tell you.

I tried to nap a little more once I finally got on the bus, but my seat made that pretty much impossible. Greyhound managed to construct a seat that’s uncomfortable, no matter how you sit in it. I tried reclining the chair, kicking my legs into the aisle, scrunching up in a ball, and hundreds of other positions over the course of our journey, but nothing worked. Just when I thought I was comfortable enough to take a quick nap, I’d notice that my right leg and half of my butt had fallen asleep. At least this time I was traveling with a friend. On my previous Greyhound journey, my seat mate was Jabba the Hut, who spilled into my seat, pinning me against the window with a wall of jiggling fat.

D didn’t seem to have any trouble falling asleep though, and was only just waking up when the bus rolled into the lonely downtown of Wheeling West Virginia. It was still pretty dark outside and downtown Wheeling wasn’t exactly aglow with skyscrapers and flashing neon. I’m not even sure if it was aglow from street lamps. “Where are we?” she asked me.

“I think we’re in Wheeling. I guess we’re just going to stop for a second, and then head to Pittsburgh.”

“Are you excited yet?”

I yawned and stretched. “Not yet. Ask me when we get to Pittsburgh”.

Truthfully, it wasn’t just my inability to catch a decent nap that was preventing the excitement from kicking in. We were still over an hour behind schedule, and we were supposed to change buses in Pittsburgh. If we missed that connection, there was no telling how long we’d be stuck there, maybe even an entire day. I was supposed to file a story “on my journey to DC” by 7 PM, and that would prove difficult to do if I didn’t actually arrive in DC before 7. I silently hoped that our connecting bus was late as well.

Our bus driver must have somehow heard my silent pleas. While D slept, and I turned to my iPod as a distraction from my worries, our bus thundered along the highway at speeds not even close to legal. Most buses stay in the righthand land and cruise close to the speed limit, but we darted around traffic as if we were a motorcycle, not a gigantic passenger bus. By some sort of miracle, we pulled into the bus station 15 minutes before we were scheduled to change buses. The driver got on the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, you are many things. You are Black, White, Young, Old, Man and Woman…..but you are no longer late”. I could have hugged him.

The Bus station in Pittsburgh was very different than the Columbus station. Columbus isn’t much of a Greyhound hub, so their station is small and sparse, with a few dirty benches, some dingy overpriced vending machines, and old video games that nobody wants to play. Pittsburgh is apparently a major hub for all the entire east coast. If you’re in the midwest and you want to bus to the East Coast, you have to pass through the Pittsburgh Greyhound station. It had more than twice the number of gates as the last station, and everything looked new and clean. In addition to the typical vending machine fare, this station had flatscreen TV’s showing CNN and ESPN, and what looked to be a mini restaurant/convenience store. It was about time for a late breakfast, and there were probably some things we could pick up for our trip, so D and I stashed our packs by our gate, and went to explore the store.

The back corner of the mini mart was labeled “The Greyhound Grill”, which advertised your typical burgers and pizza fare, along with hot breakfasts. After inspecting the menu, I decided that some pancakes would taste delicious, and stepped up to place my order. Only nobody was there. I peaked over the counter, waited some more, and then shuffled around the Grill area uncomfortably.

A voice from across the mini mart had the answer. “Oh, they don’t open that until 12:30 I think” said a greyhound employee. “You can only buy the prepackaged foods here at the minimart”

“If you don’t open until 12:30, why are you selling breakfast foods? Why is there no sign?” I really had my heart set on some pancakes. The picture looked so inviting.

“I don’t know. I’m just the cashier lady.” We sighed, bought some four dollar muffins (that only provided maybe a dollar fifty of hunger relief), and went to board our next bus, which was set to take us across Pennsylvania, into Maryland, and finally Washington DC.

It was light for the first time, so I finally got a chance to glimpse at some of my fellow passengers. Like my previous Greyhound adventures, it looked like we had quite the cast of characters. I could see a man trying to sell little American flags to everybody on the bus. “Please help me out here guys. I’m going to the Inauguration and this is how I’m going to pay for my ticket back” (We didn’t buy any). I saw a few people that looked like college students, a few ambiguously sketchy folks, and dozens of people wearing Obama buttons or paraphernalia (including two people that were wearing way too much Obama paraphernalia. I couldn’t tell what color their coat was supposed to be, it was so covered in buttons). At the time, I didn’t really have a reason to be particularly interested in any of my fellow passengers. I made a quick phone call, then decided to flip through the book I was reading.

Apparently, the seats are not the only part of the bus that had less than stellar craftsmanship. I looked up from my book to discover that our bus was no longer humming along a highway in Pennsylvania, but was sitting in a mall parking lot. My fellow passengers were exchanging worried looks, so I started to get worried. The bus driver got up to the intercom and started to talk.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it appears we have a small problem with this doodad here in the engine system, and now our brakes aren’t working so well. We’ll have a replacement bus coming to pick you up in about an hour or so. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for riding Greyhound. Actually, I have no idea what he said, because the bus intercom system hadn’t been updated since the Carter administration, so it came out like the teacher’s voice in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Regardless, we now had an unexpected pit stop in Monroeville Pennsylvania.

According to my extensive research[2], Monroeville is a suburb of Pittsburgh, with a population of roughly 30,000. Apparently it had been quite the prosperous little town back when coal and steel were huge industries, but from my window, all I could see were vacant strip malls and fast food joints. That’s okay, because I didn’t buy a bus ticket to go see the sights and sounds of Western Pennsylvania…and after sitting in that bus for 4 and a half hours already with nothing to eat but a crappy, overpriced muffin, I was ready for some fast food.

The new bus wasn’t coming for at least an hour, so a few of us passengers walked a few blocks to a Panera to grab some lunch. I grabbed a seat next to a window, and spread my notebooks and paperwork across the table, next to my delicious turkey sandwich. If I was going to be stuck here for a few more hours, I might as well get some work done. I tried to write down a few notes from the trip so far, to maybe use in one of my newspaper articles, but my thoughts kept drifting to our bus situation. I kept checking the window every few seconds; to make sure that the new bus hadn’t arrived yet. This absolutely drove D crazy.

“Are you seriously checking again? It’s been what, 7 minutes?” she asked more than once.

I couldn’t help it. What if we were left here? I needed to think of some sort of contingency plan. Perhaps that’s another thing they don’t tell you about Greyhound buses, I mused to myself. Always think of a backup plan.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to employ any of my poorly hatched doomsday backup plans. Maybe fifteen minutes after I walked out of Panera, another Greyhound rolled up next to ours in the Monroeville Mall parking lot, ready for the next leg of our journey.

I didn’t think it was possible for a bus to be even more dilapidated and uncomfortable than the one we took to Pittsburgh, but our replacement vehicle managed to break all the records. The “new” bus was a little bit smaller, but managed to cram in four more seats. This made anything resembling foot room nothing but a vicious rumor. There was some sort of fan built in right above my seat, making an obnoxious WRRRRRRR sound the rest of the trip. It was maybe 35 degrees outside, and the bus certainly wasn’t warm, so the fan didn’t seem to serve any purpose besides annoying me. Customer satisfaction is clearly a priority of the Greyhound Bus Company.

I don’t think I was the only passenger who noticed the less than stellar condition of our new steed. Before we could pull out of the mall parking lot, one of the passengers in the front stood up and said something to the bus driver that I couldn’t hear. Then he stood up in the front of the bus and asked us to bow our heads, because he was going to pray.

“Dear Lord, we thank you for watching over us and blessing us every day. We ask that you pour out your blessings onto our bus driver, and this bus, that we might safely and quickly arrive in DC to see the inauguration of our new President. Amen”. A few passengers let out scattered “amens”, and the man went back to his seat.

Despite being a religious person myself, I’m normally a little uncomfortable with public community prayers like this…but not then. The way this trip was going, we needed all the help we could get in order to get to DC on time, and if that meant publicly asking The Big Man to watch over us, I could live with that.

The bus was also filthy. My seat was dotted with what looked like fossilized Cheetos. The floor hadn’t been cleaned in ages, making your shoes stick to the floor with every step. It was like walking in some sort of tar pit, or maybe a movie theater. The windows still had the residue of dead bugs (did they leave them there to set an example for other bugs?). I swept as much trash off of my chair as I could, pulled out my book, and tried to find some semblance of normalcy for the rest of the trip.

This proved difficult to do, because I was starting to see that some of our fellow passengers on the trip were anything but normal. Greyhound passengers typically fall into two groups: college students/people who cannot afford plane tickets, and people who don’t stand a chance of passing the required security checkpoints on airplanes[3]. I was maybe 15 the first time I ever rode on a Greyhound, and on that short trip between Columbus and Cleveland, my fellow passengers tried to sell me drugs no less than three times[4]. Nobody tried to sell drugs on this trip, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have a few characters on the bus.

Perhaps the most interesting of my fellow travelers was “The Baby Lady”. The Baby Lady seemed normal enough. She was maybe a few years older than me, and had the most adorable, outgoing little baby boy, who would make faces at some of the other passengers and laugh. I taught the kid how to drum on one of the bus seats, much to the chagrin of some of the other passengers. On a long trip through the doldrums of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, The Baby Lady’s baby was a welcome diversion.

But then somewhere outside of Monroeville, The Baby Lady decided she wanted to take a nap. She curled up as best she could in the terrible bus seat, passed her baby to two random passengers next to her, and went to sleep. She slept through half of Pennsylvania, and her laughing child slowly made the rounds along the side of the bus. I don’t profess to have any great paternal instincts, but after watching a child get passed along a Greyhound bus like a teenager crowd surfing at a rock concert, something deep within me stirred. I don’t know much about raising children, but this cannot be right. I turned and looked at my girlfriend, who appeared to be having the same reaction. After watching another group of passengers try to feed the baby some of those fossilized Cheetos, I wanted to leap out of my seat, grab the kid, and find the nearest Social Services Agent. I hope that poor kid had all of his shots.

The bus rolled past Breezewood[5], and into Maryland, and I started looking for new ways to entertain myself. I had finished my book, my iPod was low on batteries, and my girlfriend had managed to defy all known laws of Physics, and had fallen asleep. I had an article due only a few hours after we were scheduled to arrive in DC, and I noticed that my notebook had precious little in the way of actual, usable notes [6]. I overheard a few people talking about the upcoming inauguration, so I decided to introduce myself, and join the conversations.

It turns out that many of my fellow travelers were quite interesting, and not just in the drug trafficking/reckless child endangerment sort of way. More than half of the bus passengers were headed to the inauguration, and all of them had a story. One woman flew in from England, without an inauguration ticket, and knowing that she had to be back in England in three days. This baffled many of her fellow passengers. Most of us could understand why an American would want to travel to see Obama (after all, that’s what most of us were doing), but Obama wasn’t even her president! When faced with these questions, the lady would just smile, and said that even foreigners can appreciate the major history. “Electing somebody like Obama is a victory for us all” she said.

Another passenger was a law student from Kansas, who had been on buses for two straight days, having weathered another bus breakdown in Missouri. Despite having to endure 24 hours of bus, he was in good spirits, and never complained once.

Perhaps the most interesting to me were two travelers a few rows up from me. They were about my age, and were from Fresno California. They had been on Greyhound buses for three straight days, and were going to make that same journey home the day after the inauguration. I thought that international conventions prevented this sort of thing from happening. I incredulously asked them why they would want to come so far, and spend so much time in so uncomfortable a setting. They just grinned, and held up a copy of that day’s USA Today. The headline read “JUST FOR THE FEELING OF BEING THERE”. I smiled, nodded, and made that my lead for my first article.

I met a few other passengers on the bus. Sometimes I spoke, or asked questions, but mostly I listened and took notes. I didn’t tell anybody I was a journalist, I just stepped back, and let other people tell their stories that they were so eager to share. Maybe that’s something that Greyhound ought to play up a little more. Ride Greyhound, come back with a story. That’s something they certainly didn’t tell me about.

After one last hiccup (a huge traffic jam on Interstate 95), we finally arrived at Union Station in Washington DC. We were only about two and a half hours late, which isn’t actually all that bad, if my other Greyhound trips are any indication. [7] It was starting to get dark, but we still had plenty of time to walk to the nearest Metro stop, and head to a friend’s apartment, where I could file my story on the journey and appease my hungry editors.

My confirmation email was pretty simple. It told me to arrive at the station in Columbus at 3:30 AM, and to bring my email and confirmation number. The email told me that a bus would take me to Pittsburgh, and then to Washington DC, and it left a number I could call in case I needed a refund. That was it. Nobody said anything about the optional customer service, or how arrival times were merely fluid suggestions, not rigid schedules. Nobody told me I would leave the bus trip with a notebook full of stories either. [8] I guess there is quite a bit they don’t tell you about Greyhound buses.