Bus travel is not romantic. Consider yourself warned.

"I love travel -- the airport's concentrated preoccupation, the train car's delightfully inescapable propinquity with strangers, the road trip's unreachable-ness and sheer fancy. The commute and not the destination is what piques my emotions and returns my excitement to a child’s unqualified delight. I feel again that sense of vulnerability mixed with wonder that I remember most about childhood travel."

I was reading over my journal on my computer, and found this. Clearly, I wrote that before taking a bus, and so I’d like to put this story out there to anyone who may think of romanticizing “the commute” the way I did. Ah, sweet innocence.

pic from michaelmurray's blog

Two months ago, armed with my self-entitled and rashly broadcasted love for the commute, I embarked upon a seven-hour bus ride with eyes wide open ( I was trying to get back home from Chicago, where I had come from Vermont, where I was visiting friends).

To my friends’ tentative suggestions of the famed unpleasantness of bus travel I deigned only scornful replies.

No, no, I don’t care, I assured them. I, you see, am independent of such petty cares as comfort when The Wanderlust takes me. I am a true bohemian, a gypsy, a care-free spirit, I implied, with something of a patronizing pity for their attachment to the lesser worries of comfort and safety, of shelter and sustenance.

Of, I later realized, survival. For, quite frankly, bus travel is not idyllic. It has no hidden wild, fun side to be coaxed out by the imaginative traveler. It allows no space for games or pretentions or, for that matter, body odor.

The propinquity with strangers is not romantic. It is, yes, inescapable, but not, oh-dear-naïve me of a year ago- “delightfully” so.

The child’s vulnerability is certainly there, but, and again I address my lamentably ignorant self of a year ago, NOT mixed with wonder. With nausea, with hopelessness, with the lack of a seatbelt, a bathroom, or water, with fear, with a lingering confusion as to whether the thing poking into the back of your seat was or was not a hand and whether it did or did not make its stealthy way to do god-knows-what while you were sleeping --- yes.

But wonder, especially the type of wonder associated with Shirley Temple’s blue eyes widening as her rosy mouth opens in a perfect “o” to express her unprecedented joy – no. No, no.

Not that there were no high points. Because there were. The highlights of the trip were two:
--The first was when I awoke to see the sign for Gary, Indiana, and hummed Gary, Indiana (Not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome, but-- Gary, Indiana…) for about fifteen miles.
--The second when the bus chugged into a rest stop/Wendy’s and the driver told us we had ten minutes to get dinner, although he was breaking a rule by stopping.

When having the chance to buy water at the expense of the pervasive odor of stale fries and pickles clinging to the entire bus for the following four hours is a “highlight,” well, you’re not exactly experiencing wonder.

Bus travel is NOT romantic. Humane travel intended for plane and train passengers only. Not tested on bus passengers. Consider yourself warned.