The Big One

Dear Greyhound Customer Service,

Please train your staff to know which routes take the discovery pass !

Please train your staff to remember that some of your passengers are tourists; visitors to the united states of America who have not been there before and who do not know the ins and outs of your quite complicated system. It's also worth pointing out that some of your staff don't either.

Otherwise, it should be noted that despite these small points of feedback, I've had a very enjoyable time on this trip and, for your part in this, you should be thanked very muchly.

All the best,

Josh Johnston

********************************

Last time we spoke, I had been traveling overnight to Nashville Tennessee having travelled down the east coast from Boston.

We arrived into Nashville with a two hour gap before the comparatively short journey to Evansville Indiana where I was stopping to visit my brother-in-law's parents. In Richmond bus station, I had overheard a conversation between three ladies of three separate generations. The elderly concerned grandmother, the doting and well-behaved aunt and the somewhat dopey younger girl (grand-daughter, it turned out who was dopey on a number of different levels) and they were discussing the ups and downs of their family's checkered past detailing mistakes made by all and sundry and leaving no stone unturned, throwing particular scorn at the girls' mother who wasn't present. . As younger girl went off to have her third cigarette (smoking opportunities gain value - to smokers - the longer you are on a greyhound bus) I chatted about nothing in particular to the two other women who were wondering when the bus would arrive - eventually left 45 minutes late - and it transpired that Jen (dopey youngster) and I were going to same place.

Concerned grandmother to josh:

"do you think you could make sure Jen gets off at the right stop ?"

Josh:

"I guess so"

A two-hour gap is a nice comfortable gap for breakfast. Not entirely sure what this would entail, I nonetheless had ideas along the sausages / bacon / bagel combination line and so it was with tears in my eyes that I read the sign on the cafe door - "grill closed until 11am" (ten minutes after my bus departed). I settled on a package sandwich which was actually pretty good and a lot fresher than the packaging implied. The bus was 50 minutes late but I did not revisit the food idea as I had eaten the sandwich by this stage.

The bus that arrived was a different design to the others I had travelled on this far and while there was no reason to fear for safety or even comfort, this was the beginning of a slow dawning that the next few days would mark a great decrease in technology options available to passengers. No wi-fi. No power sockets. The continued arrivals of white buses over the next week (as opposed to silver buses) brought groans of despair from countless passengers who had obviously started their journey on the east coast like myself and who assumed the silver buses were the only types of buses. By the end of the trek, there were four coaches identifiable;

Posh silver - wi-fi and sockets

White - wi-fi and sockets but sockets didn't work very well.

White - no wi-fi or sockets but by far the most comfortable bus

White - no wi-fi or sockets, everyone squashed in, pile 'em high, sell 'em quick

These buses tended to run east to west - i think they obviously must migrate west as newer fleet comes in.

The absence of wi-fi definitely made a long journey longer so the two hours to Evansville felt like a marathon. Somehow or other, I missed the stop at Clarksville (think i was asleep - particularly annoying as I had a song I needed to sing at that point) and minus phone battery and wi-fi I found it very hard to work out where I was (google maps is wonderful) so the trip felt very long. It also felt very long for poor Bill and Mary who were waiting for me at the station and had left their house before the phone message i left to say I was most likely going to be an hour or so late. I managed to make sure Jen got off before finding Bill and Mary. We headed back to kentucky and had a lovely night with them eating steak at the finest steakhouse in Owensboro Kentucky (which is a lot better than it sounds). We also had a great Skype video chat with Becky, Scott and Aoife in Killiney which was super for all concerned. Got to catch up with Jungmann family news as well as see the philpott ranch that I'd heard so much about but never seen.

A good sleep and a mass recharge of all my various devices and I was ready to head back up to Indiana for the beginning of what has been since christened the "big one" and with good reason.

Between 1.30 on Thursday and 2.30 on Saturday I was on a bus or at a station either grabbing something to eat or queuing up for another bus. Some people might find this or even the idea of this hideous but I enjoyed the adventure of the idea. There were plenty of people to talk to throughout and many people were crossing multiple legs with me. Las Vegas was a common destination and there were many tales told of fun and games there. The bus arrived (a white one without wi-fi) and the two of us piled on. The first person I met at this point was coming home to Arkansas from Las Vegas and had been left in Evansville by his friend because this guy didn't want him to drive back on his own. He warned me about greyhound journeys and the fact that Americans can be mean. He told me of a woman he saw being robbed on an overnighter having left her money in her bra. He saw but didn't realize what was happening until she reported it in the morning due to the half light by which stage the perpetrator had long since departed the bus. I made a mental note not to be flashing things about and to carry my hand luggage with me but was a little tetchy for most of that leg. After the rest stop at Mount Vernon Illinois (first McDonalds of too many) four burly men who all looked very dodgy at first glance got onto the bus and sat beside and around me. A little flustered but resolutely staying as calm as possible, I kept myself to myself even as the guy beside me asked if my phone was an iPhone. About five minutes later another of the dudes suggested that I might be Irish . . . .

"yes"

"and what are you doing in illinois ?"

So I told the four of them the full story (I figured we had plenty of time and so I told them the FULL story) during which they stopped and listened with wide-eyed amazement, stopping every now and then to say "wow" and "really ?". Suddenly I was totally part of the party, with the Irish being poked fun at as much as all other nationalities in the group. Think Arlo Guthrie on the group w bench. In the space of an hour, we had life stories of all concerned and, more importantly, what had them on the bus and where they were going. My initial friend coming back from Las Vegas, one going to Las Vegas, one traveling hundreds of miles to see his daughter having lost his wife after going to jail but now trying to mend fences with ex, daughter and foster a new relationship in Memphis Tennessee. Others too - can't remember everyone.

"New beginnings" was a common thread across all the fellow passengers that i met on the various buses - setting up new homes, new jobs, new lives and the travels taking place across a huge distance. I found this very interesting particularly as so much of the adventure is about re-evaluating my life and what I'm doing with it. In some way, many people found my tales entertaining and I found myself wondering whether it was mutually beneficent - I didn't HAVE to do the journey so, although it was very long, it seemed easier because I was observing these people who felt they did HAVE to do it and sometimes did HAVE to do it more than once a year. Likewise, it's possible that the eccentricity of what I was doing axe their journey shorter too - there was a significant feeling of for one, for all about all the legs (particularly the later ones).

St. Louis Toodle-oo

At St. Louis we got a grey bus (hooray) but our joy was short-lived when we discovered that our wi-fi was in payoff to working air-conditioning so when we arrived in Kansas City we were all loaded off and back onto a white bus.

One of the people I was chatting to longest was David. And although I wasn't sitting next to him from the beginning, I first noticed him in St. Louis. We had an excellent ongoing conversation from Denver to Salt Lake City where he told me about his views on everything: local, regional and national politics, marriage, the economy, foreign policy, the EU, drugs policy, and, of course, greyhound rules and regulations. These are generally informed by experience which has contributed to him having a fascinating backstory. Having just worked for 9 months at a residential drug clinic in New Jersey, he was on his way to Nevada to resume a job he left some years ago to get married. All my life's a circle.

Everything's up-to-date in Kansas City

What can we learn from Kansas City ? Mostly that it's not in Kansas which totally surprised me. After we changed buses onto the manky but cool one (in terms of temperature), we continued on through actual Kansas through Topeka and Lawrence before our driver Annie retired to go to bed. This was fortunate as most of the coach might have died from laughter if she had continued on the bus any longer. I have spoken about greyhound drivers before. They all have things they have to say but all like to be distinctive about their performance of these lines. There are a few basic rules about traveling on the bus. You don't smoke on board. You don't drink alcoholic beverages inboard. You don't partake in illegal drugs on board. You don't speak loudly and you don't use personal audio devices without headphones (and if the driver can hear it then it's too loud). On the journey between Richmond and Nashville we had to get off the bus at 5am to allow it to be swept through. Shortly before we arrived in Knoxville Tennessee our driver turned on the mic and started singing Smooth Operator which was a bit weird and creepy at first but was actually quite charming and a slow and gentle way to wake us all up.

Joining the bus in St. louis, Funky driver Annie was very proud of her re-worked script and rapped it eloquently often repeating it a number of times at each station. We would shortly be driving through Kansas and it might get windy and blow the bus a bit but not to worry, she wasn't asleep and she had it "all . . . . .locked . . . . . Down". Or the other one was the basic rule that if you wanted to smoke, you wanted to walk. And again she would repeat everything at least three times before leaving us to our own devices. By Salinas Kansas, when Annie was leaving us, the back of the bus had become increasingly giddy with loud guffaws on the "all locked down" line. Her speech was the same in salinas but it had slowed down considerably. She sounded tired and we were not altogether upset she was getting to go home either.

Rod's colleague in Richmond had pointed out that the Midwest was the main reason God had invented planes and my brother Luke had pointed out that while it might be nice to see sights along the way, the same sight after 8 hours might prove a bit boring. Both comments were valid. Bill and Mary who met in Topeka Kansas told me much the same thing. Kansas was certainly very flat and had a lot of nothingness to it and it was very nice that a lot of it was passed overnight.

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore

I had two options at Denver bus station and with a half-hour changeover didn't have enough time to do both

1) get some breakfast

2) Check that all was ok to use my discovery pass between Ontario and Bend Oregon

I decided that the latter option was prudent, particularly as the Bend / Seattle conundrum had not been satisfactorily solved yet. This dilemma involved my trip to Bend to see a cousin of Scott's who is also a Unitarian minister and is also living with another Unitarian minister. Both have expressed an enjoyment of my music and I thought maybe there might be an opportunity to play at another UU service. Having made contact with Cathy and Heather, Heather said yes, she'd love me to play at her service. By the time we reached St. Louis, I had done some research and realized I was not going to be able to stay long enough to play at the service. So i needed to work out which bus was going to work to get me to seattle on sunday. I also wasn't convinced I was going to make all my connections or, for that matter, that my discovery pass would be taken on the last leg from Ontario. So much as I was excited about meeting new people, it seemed a long way to go for less than the 20 hours my schedule gave me there particularly as I now had three or four less than before (and missing church). I had made tentative enquiries with Stephen Phayre about coming straight to Seattle and leaving Oregon out altogether but, having forsaken breakfast and got a satisfactory answer from greyhound about the discovery pass, I decided to go to Bend as originally planned.

Rocky mountain high, Colorado

We set off from Denver, high in expectation at seeing wonderful sights of the Rockies, particularly important as I had missed the Appalachian mountains. The Rockies were impressive and I got a photo

I'm no photographer nut it breaks up the text.

This was at 11.30. We then saw nothing of any interest until about 7pm. That's a bit mean. There was some interesting bits but an awful lot of mind-numbing nothingness all the way through colorado and Wyoming and most of Utah. Our indian driver was definitely in training, drove like a snail kept saying "i will be getting your attention" and things like that. We stopped early in the day at a state penitentiary and picked up a prison guard and someone who looked like an inmate - nobody was quite sure of the circumstances behind this but there were plenty of theories - and somebody else was dropped off (but it may well have been a town too). After our 30 minute rest stop in Twin Falls Idaho, a wise owl in the back decided to light up a cigarette (and an illegal one at that) forgetting that there were three bus drivers and a prison officer on board. A few testy moments while the notion of pulling the bus over and waiting for the police were bandied about and eventually the dude in the hoodie fessed up and we were on the road again with good schedules to make everyones' connections.

Coming into Salt Lake City, it transpired that we had a local expert and as he had a girl on the bus that he obviously fancied the socks off, the rest of the bus got a guided tour of the approach into the city including pointing out a suburb on the other side of the canyon with the words "there's Colby, I once had sex with a girl there" as well as pointing out the highest artificial ski jump in the world except he knew it was "around here somewhere". Admittedly, it was quite dark so we didn't see too much either but it was an entertaining half hours' drive into the birthplace of the Jacksons and David Cassidy.

Here to Boisie, Idaho, That's how this business goes !!

That's Harry Chapin by the way. Not much else to say about the place !! An extraordinarily large woman who got on at Salt Lake City, sat beside me, fell asleep and then toppled in my direction. I held my breath from Salt Lake City to Boisie in order to give the lady as much space as needed to breathe out as she needed. I was however glad to see that she was as impressed by me on this journey as I was with her when she elected to not sit beside me after we returned to the bus at Boisie Idaho.

There was a fair share of nutters on the buses and in the stations. You had to have your wits and your bags with you at all times. An old geezer from Texas was on his way up to find work in Seattle on his way to find a house in Canada where he felt he would be safer when (not if) the world gets nuked. He felt it could happen in the next year or so. Particularly if the banks continue to get their way. He had had trouble sleeping on the lasr leg of the journey as this other woman had sat beside him and yabbered on at him all night. She was a nice person, he said, but a bit lost in the head. Which is what I had been just thinking about him. She had now lost her ticket and was i the nprocess of negotiating with greyhound that they might let her get home to Spokane Washington but even if she did make it onto the bus he wanted an alternative seating plan. Did I think I could sit beside him ? Bearing in mind the large lady who I had just had sleeping on me, I thought why not ? I let him chat at me for about ten minutes and then stuck on my headphones.

The girl who the Salt Lake City guy fancied was now being seriously flirted with in the seats across from me (like, SERIOUSLY flirted with).

She had been on my buses since St. Louis and I actually knew she was going to Bend, Oregon too so we had spoken a few times over the trip. She was escaping from a bad marriage in New Jersey that had got progressively worse - once her son had left for college, she realized that there was nothing left in the house to distract her from the troubles she was facing with her husband and when her friend from Oregon phoned and offered the room, she phoned her son, told him she was leaving for the west coast and left before her husband returned. Here we were on the home straight - a new home. She was resolute she would not be returning east.

Finally we got off the bus at the hole in the wall that was Ontario, Oregon

"hi, I'm getting the bus to Bend. He takes the Discovery Pass, right ?"

"no !"

"oh, the office in Denver told me the bus here did take that"

"no, sorry"

He did say sorry and he did let me use their private loo but in the meantime my other bus had gone so I was left paying $44 to get to Bend Oregon.

That said, the drive alone was worth it. We had a teeny weeny schoolbus - power sockets and all and Magnificent views over a four hour drive right across the top of the mountain and down again sweeping into Bend a half hour early. It was a fun drive and I got a bit of a sleep into the bargain.

The sleep was needed. I was absolutely flattened by the experience but loved it to bits, traveling through the most exciting, most boring, richest, poorest, flattest, highest, safest, most dangerous parts of America and through all extremes of weather from snow to heat wave and back to through the middle of a mini-tornado Kentucky style with companions of all ethnic backgrounds, religions. It has also reduced my insides to ribbons - not sure what part of the above has caused this. It's probably a combination of it all with an added complement of incessant McDonalds and air conditioning. Either way, I'm on a liquid diet until I get my digestive powers back.

Bend in Oregon is lovely and Cathy and Heather made for marvelous hosts. I helped them with their chicken project - the first steps to being self-sufficient. I ended up staying far too short a time and on Sunday morning, after having played a little on Heather's lovely piano, I was back on the bus again. I arrived at the bus station on Saturday and thought I'd check on the discovery pass situation again, understandably a little anxious by this stage.

"hi. I'm on a discovery pass and I want to travel to Seattle tomorrow."

The lady told me the times - departing Bend 10.15, arriving Seattle 4am. That seemed a bit crazy for what was 6 hours by car. I asked her to explain

Leave Bend 10.15

Arrive Portland 3.20

Leave Portland 7.20

Arrive Seattle 4.05 (am)

On hearing this, Stephen p kindly agreed to pick me up from Portland as we both agreed that another night on a bus might be the nail in the coffin. But before we confirmed this, I checked times on the Internet only to find that my friendly sales assistant had mixed up the words arrival and departure so I resolved to bus to Seattle for 7.20pm with a pickup and ferry ride to Poulsbo to finish the day.

To cap it off, i arrived to the bus station again to check my baggage in for the bus journey. I told her about the discovery pass saga - Denver, Ontario, Bend etc - and it turns out the bus provider from Ontario to Bend does accept the pass as does the Bend Portland bus this morning. You just can't get the staff. She promised she would ring the guy in Ontario to let him know.

Yesterday was characterized by boys chatting up very pretty girls. On the first bus coming down 4000ft from Bend through the most incredible scenes of snow, forest and mountain I've seen on the whole trip (bus moving too fast for camera), I listened to two teenage strangers playing twenty questions with each other for 2 1/2 hours. It was another small schoolbus coach so the whole coach was party to the conversation. Yet only the two participated. It was very charming and very revealing about youth and what's important to them. The second bus from Portland had me very close to hear a conversation between an American idiot trying to chat up an Indian girl and exposing to her and to me how little he knew about anything. It was very amusing, I suspect for both of us.

It has been wonderful to see Stephen Phayre and his wonderful wife Allison and their lovely three kids again and to meet one for the first time. This afternoon, we went out to look at the local shipyard with the USA naval aircraft carriers and went to Walmart to buy Ranch Dressing for my mother and then we went to Starbucks because i'm in Seattle. Tonight they (the kids) made my bed for me kindly supplying teddies to keep me company. See below for photographic evidence.

Tomorrow is my last day of this whirlwind romance before the somewhat quicker ride home. It's been a hugely exciting experience. I'm not sure yet what will come of it but am excited by that too. Looking forward to seeing Kath and Andrew, Siobhaun and Greg, and all the kids too, tomorrow for the last supper in Vancouver BC in the evening.