Greyhound Goes to Colorado

Being a survivor of the twenty-nine-hour bus ride to Walt Disney World as a teenager, I decided it was high time for another bus adventure. This time, a mere fifteen-hour trip to Colorado Springs for Easter would have to do.

During the first leg of the trip from Cowtown to Amarillo, I sat next to a guy who was heading to Amarillo to pick up a semi, so he slept most of the way. That gave me plenty of opportunities to watch the bus driver chew a wooden coffee stirrer. Seriously, he chewed the thing for close to six hours. The only other things competing for my attention were the various coughs from half of the passengers and the numerous smells--burning trash, a skunk that had sprayed, someone's overuse of Vick's VapoRub and hand sanitizer, and cigarette smoke lingering on passengers as they reboarded the bus at each stop. The passengers seemed very tame in comparison to those I had ridden with to Florida.

But then there was the return trip.

For whatever reason, the Amarillo bus station seems to be quite the melting pot. So during my hour layover, I watched as people lived out their stories around me.

The woman who talked to herself.

The young woman who sang and danced as if no one was watching. She wasn't afraid to tell everyone that she had been a ward of the State of Oregon when she was younger and that her brain didn't make serotonin.

But the one that seemed to capture everyone's attention was the eighteen-year-old boy who looked like he was about twelve and who made it known that he talked a lot because he was bipolar. He said his parents were deceased and that he was tired of dealing with people in New Mexico. He wanted to come to Texas to see "some shootings." Due to his apparent inability to filter the words that were coming out of his mouth, I was concerned that he was going to say some things that might draw some fire--as in gunfire--from some other people who were riding the bus.

But thankfully, a middle-aged gentleman with a Bible in one hand and a jacket in the other boarded the bus with the boy. The boy said that the gentleman went to his church and had helped him a lot. That gentleman sat next to the boy on the bus and allowed him to talk incessantly. And when the gentleman got off in Wichita Falls, he didn't get in the waiting taxi until he had given the boy some money and a hug.

Sights like that paint a picture of earthly angels. And yet, my drama-free bus trip makes me think maybe there were other such earthly angels on board who were less obvious.

Getting my luggage in Colorado (a/k/a proof that I took the bus)

So for those who were looking for a highly dramatic story, I'm thankful that I don't have one to tell. Just a simple trip filled with good times. And some unexpected surprises along the way . . .

Preface

Before I recap the bus trip I took during my time off, I feel it's necessary to set the stage. So here's a piece I wrote a while back for my writer's group: Greyhound Goes to Disney World.

All teenagers go through phases, and during the summer of 1988, I happened to be going through my no-flying phase; I refused to fly on airplanes because of a bad flight I had endured on a previous vacation.

Unfortunately, the timing of this phase could not have come at a worse time. That summer, my family decided to take a trip to Walt Disney World in Florida; it was to be our first “real” vacation involving a stay at a hotel.

After leaving me behind on several other family vacations that involved flying, my family decided that summer that they would do whatever it took to get me to Disney World. My mom has a bit of a driving phobia, so driving to Florida was not an option. We researched taking the train and quickly concluded that was not an option because it took over three days to travel each way. The only other option was taking the bus. And so we did, not knowing how adventurous the trip would be.

My mom, sister, and I boarded the bus in our small town for our first big stop in Houston. We quickly saw that a different class of passengers awaited us. We tried to avoid the prison and mental hospital escapees who seemed to abound at the Houston bus station. They were easy to spot because they were still wearing their jumpsuits or gowns and wristbands. But, as much as we tried to avoid the weird people, I ended up sitting next to some pretty scary people. And the ones I didn’t sit next to still made their presence known.

In the middle of the night, we were awakened in Mobile, Alabama, during a driver change. The first replacement driver who stepped on the bus received an update from the outgoing driver--something about a guy who was high on drugs who had locked himself in the bathroom and would not come out during the ticket check. The replacement driver quickly disappeared. We then waited for hours for another replacement driver and for the police to arrive and drag the armed man out of the bathroom and off the bus, while we all sat in our seats. I don’t think that we slept the rest of the night because of how scared we had been.

On the way back from Disney World, the “clientele” seemed to improve, but we still did not sleep. We had an evangelist sitting behind us who preached all night to a non-English-speaking Vietnamese man. And the air conditioning vents leaked a mysterious red, sticky substance that was later determined to be Kool-Aid.

Somehow, despite all of this, the bus adventure of 1988 did not usher me out of my non-flying phase. Instead, that phase raged on for many years and outlasted my family’s desire to accommodate it. With the bus adventure of 1988 firmly imprinted in my mother’s and my sister’s memories, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to risk their lives on another vacation by bus just for me.
--------------------------------
And here's a glimpse of what's to come: