Thank God and Greyhound

It’d been more than 50 years since I’d last run for a Greyhound bus.

But it happened again last month. And it was completely unplanned.

Julie and I were bound for Manhattan as the first official stop on my “Two Years of Paula” tour. We were getting there by way of upstate New York, where we’d been visiting our friend Mary Lynne for a couple of days. ML had just dropped us off at the Rochester train station, 45 minutes from her home, and we were due to board the Lake Shore Limited train into Manhattan within the hour. We checked our bags and settled into the waiting area, where I couldn’t stop babbling about the upcoming ride.

I’m somewhat of an Amtrak pro by now, but Julie had never ridden a long-distance train, so I couldn’t wait to introduce her to the glorious views, the dining car steaks, the expansive seating, the relaxed conversations, the sways and whistles.

Then, with the Limited due in about 20 minutes, a friendly Amtrak employee walked up with a smile. I thought she was going to give us the track number of the approaching train, so I greeted her with a five-year-old’s exuberance.

“I’m afraid I have some news,” she said.

Uh-oh. “News” from Amtrak is rarely good.

“A freight train just jumped the track in front of the Limited, and now the tracks are blocked,” she told us. “So there will be a delay.”

I tried to be optimistic. Maybe it wasn’t a full derailment. Maybe the freight train simply needed to be nudged aside.

But about 15 minutes later, another Amtrak employee walked up and said that the “delay” could mean “anything from two hours to two days.”

Two days?? Yikes! We had reservations at a New York City hotel that night, and a Broadway show to see the next day.

We needed to scramble.

A quick Internet check revealed that there was one Greyhound bus from Rochester that would get us to New York City in daylight, and it would leave within the hour. After retrieving our checked bags (and an instant refund) from Amtrak, we just had to find the bus stop, which proved to be a grueling, time-sensitive endeavor. There was a Greyhound station sitting right across the street from the Amtrak terminal, but it appeared that the bus stop itself was inexplicably not there. It was somewhere within “a range of addresses near the Rochester Transit Center.” It took an Uber ride, a fruitless phone call to Greyhound, and finally a personal visit to the Transit Center – while dragging lots of luggage – to find the stop. Two RTS employees pointed to a lonely, somewhat sketchy street while laughingly telling me that “it doesn’t look like much, but there’s a bench there, and it’s definitely a bus stop.” Well, there was no bench – just a little pole with lettering that read “Bus Stop,” and no mention of Greyhound. We stood there with our suitcases, puzzled, but then felt better when a young stoner couple walked up. They were a little spaced-out but seemed to know what they were doing.

“Is this the Greyhound stop for New York City?” I asked them.

They assured me that it was.

Sure enough, the green FlixBus showed up precisely on time. (FlixBus bought Greyhound in 2021, and now they operate somewhat as partners.) We’d bought our $60 tickets online, so we boarded without a hitch.

And let me say this:

We were the oldest passengers by about half a century.

I mean, I have eyebags older than the young people on that bus.

May I say, too, that FlixBus loves to tout its “modern and comfortable” vehicles and its free wi-fi. Yet our bus sported none of those features.

The seats were painfully cramped, the wi-fi wasn’t working, there didn’t seem to be any heat, and the bathroom must have been sketchy because no one wanted to use it.

But I have to say, the trip itself was fairly uneventful – boring, in fact. Seven hours of painful, unending boredom. There were no glorious train views, no backroads, no wheatfields, clotheslines, or junkyards. It was all highway.

Our driver drove like a bat out of hell, ignoring any and all speed limits, and we arrived precisely on time in New York City at about 7 p.m.

We did stop twice in gas station parking lots, thankfully, so we could use a decent restroom and load up on provisions, which I needed to do because of course we hadn’t brought any food in anticipation of the potential lip-smacking steak on our wonderful train that never arrived. So I brought armloads of trail mix and little peanut-butter-and-cracker packages back to our seats.

Our fellow riders were a peaceful lot. I never had to worry about whack-jobs assaulting crew members or trying to open emergency exits, as happens far too often on planes these days. No one had to be duct-taped to a seat.

We were also a polychromatic bunch. A man sitting near the driver rocked a purple turban. In front of us, a guy in a hoodie (I’m telling you, it was cold in there!) was silently jamming out to his Beats headphones. Next to him sat a woman with a voluminous ruby ’fro.

And of course my young stoner friends sat in the back vaping and filling the air with cannabinoids. Julie was concerned about her asthma but the smell never got too obnoxious.

The only obnoxious intrusion, really, was a passenger’s shoot-’em-up video game that emitted loud, screechy, cartoonish, exploding-missile sounds for five straight hours. My ears were rattling. But I didn’t even think to complain, because the passenger was a delightful little non-English-speaking boy traveling with his young mother. He could barely keep his eyes off his mom for the entire trip, nor she him, and he kept her laughing uproariously. Their bond was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

We had a charming time in New York. Saw two Broadway shows (Just in Time, about the incomparable Bobby Darin, and Gypsy, with the incomparable Audra McDonald). Laughed our butts off in a tiny comedy club (I have a conviction that New York comedians are much better than San Francisco comedians, but that’s for another day). Visited the Tenement Museum and learned about working-class Jewish and Italian immigrants who lived in the same New York City neighborhoods from the 1860s to the 1930s. Saw the Anne Frank exhibit, which re-creates the annex where the teenage Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for more than two years. Was in “The View” audience when Joe and Jill Biden were special guests. Took the subway to nearly every neighborhood in Manhattan, including pilgrimages to the Chelsea Hotel and the Apollo Theater. Ate my first-ever real New York bagels. I would go back just for those.

But I keep thinking about that Greyhound ride. It was the only truly adventurous part of the trip, wasn’t it?

There was a time when Greyhound was the only long-distance transportation I could afford, and it thrilled me, but those were my college days. In principle I would love to ride those buses more and remember what it was like not to need all the material comforts I’ve gotten used to now. I wish I could be that cool. I wish I could be that spartan. But let’s face it – am I going to elect to sit cramped on a long-distance bus ever again? Heck no. And it almost fills me with shame that I need to be so comfortable.

Many people don’t have that option.

But I guess I can compromise. I need to get back on my preferred mode of transportation – a train. Train travel can be awfully rustic, and many people disparage and avoid it because of that. But I don’t mind, even at my age. So I guess I’m not a completely spoiled wimp.

I will, in fact, be boarding a long-distance train in a couple of months, as the “Two Years of Paula” continue.

Fingers crossed that nothing derails.

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Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.

April 5, 1976 [age 20]:

“[My sister] Janine’s Confirmation was today, and last night we all went out to dinner at Dinah’s Shack. I had four salads (lettuce, macaroni, potato, and carrot-and-raisin), chips and bleu cheese spread, marinated herring, ham, salami, cheddar hunks, fried prawns, biscuits, French fries, corn on the cob, wine, coffee, and ice cream. Then when I got home I tore into some Oreos.”

April 15, 1976 [age 20]:

“[My friend] Carolyn and I saw ‘All the President’s Men’ today with Hoffman & Redford about the two reporters who uncovered Watergate. It was great. Then I drove over to [another friend] Mary’s house and we called every ice cream parlor in town, but they were all closed so we decided to eat pizza. As we were leaving, though, we realized that Mary was locked out so I drove to a phone booth and we called her landlord, who made us meet him at Courtesy Chevrolet on Stevens Creek Blvd. We ended up at Guido’s [restaurant], where I took the wrong pizza and we’d eaten two pieces of this cute guy’s linguica pizza before he came over with our salami one and asked for his rightful pizza. We sheepishly gave him two pieces of ours.”

April 20, 1976 [age 20]:

“A weird thing happened to me between my class and [my friend] Colleen’s baby shower. I was on the 4^th floor of McQuarrie Hall, enjoying a brief respite in the restroom, when all of a sudden a janitor (I assume) came in and turned the lights off. So there I was all alone in UTTER blackness – I mean BLIND, in blackness you’ve never even seen before, scared to death. (Of course, my night blindness didn’t help any.) I couldn’t see even to complete my transaction on the toilet, and when I got up the courage to stand up, I had to blindly grope around for quite a while before finding the door. It was terrifying. Luckily he hadn’t locked the door, or I would have panicked and started to scream. I tell you, the situations I get into . . .”

April 22, 1976 [age 20]:

“After listening to some Janis Ian in the [Student Union] listening rooms, I went to Camera One [theater] because I just HAD to see the first motorcycle movie ever made. I went with [my dorm mate] Linda, who had never seen a Brando film before, nor had she known about him outside of ‘The Godfather.’ (She’s culturally sheltered but sexually liberated, and I used to think the two were incompatible.) ‘The Wild One’ was just like all the early young generation-rebel movies, like James Dean’s films, but much worse, because it was loaded with clichés like ‘We’ve just gotta go, man.’ But I guess they weren’t clichés back then.”

April 23, 1976 [age 20]:

“I skipped my English Lit class to go see Jane Fonda today. I didn’t want to listen to her political views, necessarily (she was campaigning for her husband Tom Hayden), but I’ve always admired her acting ability and I like to see talented people in person. It was kind of sad, really; she was trying to incite an apathetic student body to action, but everyone was just squinting into the sun, trying to get a tan.”

April 26, 1976 [age 20]:

“I bought the new Schedule of Classes and nearly died when I sat down to figure out my list of courses for next semester. I concluded four main things:

1. I’ll be damn busy
2. I may not be able to have enough units to graduate
3. Because of double major complications, I may not graduate
4. I’d better go see some advisors.”

April 28, 1976 [age 20]:

“At my poetry class tonight was Gwendolyn Brooks, a poetess who won the Pulitzer Prize and who was a great! fantastic! funny! touching speaker. I love it and am going to write my poetry paper on her and William Everson. I met a woman there who’s just beginning her English major and I turned her on to Kerouac. See how friendly I’m becoming?”

April 30, 1976 [age 20]:

“God was kind to me today. Even though [my roommate] Sally has strep and mono, and I felt like I was getting a cold and a sore throat, somehow I’m not sick! I was so scared of not being able to go to The [Day on the Green] Concert tomorrow, so I took all kinds of preventative measures: I ate a lot, took something like 2000 mg of Vitamin C, drank lots of orange juice at every meal, ate citrus fruits, drank fluids, stayed warm, got lots of sleep, didn’t go to work this morning, and voilà! No sickness! I would just perish if I couldn’t go to that concert with [my friend] Joe. We went to the liquor store tonight and got some wine, rum, and Hawaiian Punch. Joe and I whipped up a delicious rum punch at his house and got our boda bags ready, so now we’re all set. Is there anything more fantastic than a boda bag?”

May 2, 1976 [age 20]:

“Ah, Day on the Green. I am HORRIBLY sunburned on my arms, one of two souvenirs I have of the concert today. The other is 1-1/2 rolls of film I took of UFO, Gary Wright, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Frampton, assorted dancing people, a man with a little teeny baby, colored smoke bombs, flying toilet paper, airplanes, etc. I had a nice mellow time with Joe – we drank out of our boda bags and enjoyed some fine Columbian, but otherwise we were sober and enjoyed the music. Frampton came back for three encores; one of them was “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” with Carlos Santana, which was quite the surprise. We were up on the third deck; it was hot; Joe was cute; and people were OD’ing like flies.”