I’m sensitive to strong odors, and when I was riding back and forth from college to my parent’s home and back (early 80’s), the combination of diesel fumes and cigarette smoke invariably gave me severe headaches. Now since then perhaps they’ve outlawed smoking on the bus, but I still shudder at the memory.
Where are you, and where is your son?
Would Amtrak be an option? Minus food and accommodation, it’s not too expensive but can be slower than the bus. On the other hand it’s a lot more comfortable than a bus.
I took Greyound a lot in college. It’s not usually a ton of fun, though I do enjoy zoning out, listening to music and looking out the windows. Personally I think it’s more fun than flying if time isn’t too big of an issue.
I think it’d be a good experience for him. If you get used too doing these things when you are young, you will be a lot less high-maintenance and fussy when you want to do some serious traveling. Learning how to sleep on a bus, handle a weirdo or two, entertain yourself while the train is late and put up with a few hours of mild discomfort is an essential skill for adulthood that too many people miss.
A Boston radio talk show made made a junior staff member and an intern take the bus from Boston to Arizona for the Superbowl. They called in a few times a day to report on their travels. It sounded like a nightmare. Just a few hours out of Boston, one of the windshield wipers broke and they had to sit beside the road for 6 hours so that parts and mechanics could arrive. They arrived at bus stops in the middle of the night and got to mingle with homeless people. The one-way ride took over 70 hours. There is no way I could do that ever.
I have a friend who was taking a middle of the night bus to Washington, NC (edit: specifically as opposed to DC.) He said “Is this the bus to Washington?” or whatever, and the guy said yes, and he went to sleep. Woke up in Richmond.
Twenty Eight years ago I decided to see the country using a RailPass. Unfortunately, it turned out that there WAS NO American RailPass, like the Eurail one. So I bought a 30-day bus pass from Greyhound, sweety-talked a copy of the nationwide schedule book, and set off across country, mooching off friends and relatives, asnd staying at college dorms when i couldn’t find either.
I have no complaints. The seats were pretty comfortable, and the people were interesting. I met military members and Hispanic kids and Generic Housewives. No weirdos. I read a lot, so that was no hardship, and I got to see the country from the ground instead of from On Top.
My only bad experince with greyhound was another trip, from Boston to New York over a Thanksgiving holiday. The 80 yeaar old guy next to me kept sneaking smokes, and the traffic in NYC was so bad that it took us an hour to go 20 blocks. But I can’t blame the bus company for either of those.
I recently took a seven hour bus trip. No food, no water. I’d rather fly or take Amtrak.
Ah, Amtrak. Slower than a bus, more expensive than a plane.
I’ve never traveled long distance via bus, but I have taken a 15-hour train and bus ride from LA to SF. It was incredibly boring. And it was supposed to be an 11-hour trip :(.
Unless you’re in the Northeast Corridor *, yeah, that’s pretty accurate.
For long-distance convenience travel, Amtrak rarely makes much sense anymore. It has fairly few long-distance routes, there’s big chunks of the country that aren’t well-served by it, it’s often expensive, and its schedules are at the mercy of the freight railroads that own most of the track.
Long-distance Amtrak routes may be good for sightseers / vacationers, or train buffs, but not so much for someone who needs to get from Point A to Point B inexpensively.
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- The Northeast Corridor (from Washington DC to Boston) has well-maintained, high-speed, popular service, and is frequently the best option for traveling between those cities.
My Greyhound memories are 20+ years old; I haven’t taken an inter-city bus since 1988. With the changes that have happened in air travel since then (making it much less “exclusive” than it used to be), I wonder if the Greyhound users today are still the same kind of people that they were back then. My suspicion is that a lot of the people who rode the bus 20 years ago are flying on Southwest today; I wonder who that leaves on the bus.
I will NEVER AGAIN take greyhound. I once bought a ticket to go from Montreal to NYC and the bus that came was overbooked. Then the next one that came was overbooked. Then the NEXT one that came was overbooked. The next bus never came.
The bus station I was waiting in was sketchy and I didn’t like the prospect of having to wait overnight in a sketchy area because they couldn’t guarantee me a bus. I wound up taking a taxi to the amtrak station and taking the train.
An earlier time I took greyhound, we pulled off to the side of the road because some random passenger kept harrassing the driver to “pull over and let me off”. Contrary to some claims of this thread, the driver kept insisting that he couldn’t let the guy off for liability issues, etc. This was the I-87 around Saratoga. Eventually the driver pulled over because the guy was seriously impairing his driving, screaming, etc, and began to call the cops. The guy then shoved the driver against the window, opened the door himself, and ran into the woods. The driver yelled and ran out of the bus after him. The cops showed up eventually, but we were stuck on the side of the road for an hour while they looked for him. Then the driver came back and we went on our way. Dunno if they ever found him or not.
That being said, the NYC bus-crowd tends to be a little rougher than normal. If you’re in the midwest, I’d imagine it’s a lot calmer.
Oh please, let him take the bus!
MAKE him take the bus!
If nothing it will be an experience. The chance of him getting hurt or anything like that is zero. There may be some weird characters, but exposure to weird people is very helpful in life. The fact that he wants to take it makes me think he’s up to the challenge. His mom is just being a mom. Let her know that he’ll be fine and that he’s old enough to choose for himself.
I’ve ridden long bus rides before. Not very fun, but you get by. It’s somehow easier than a long plane ride though. I guess it’s the lack of airplane air and noise that make it easier, plus slightly more room.
If I recall correctly, greyhound isn’t really all that much cheaper than Amtrak is it? What you can look into is other private bus companies. They have these that run along the east coast. They will typically go very far without stopping. I think Greyhounds probably make a lot of stops. The fewer stops the better, because obviously it doesn’t take 25 hours to go from IN to VA.
I have ridden busses all over the world, from Turkey to Australia, Uzbekistan to the US. The US ranks near the bottom. 
On a recent 6 hour bus ride in Nevada, at the origin, one of the last passengers to board was clearly a bit drunk (tho not falling over). He stood at the front and announced “I’m the MAN and I own this bus… YEAH!”. About 40 minutes and many announcements later we dropped him at a local police station. From talking to others, this is not uncommon.
I’ve done it several times. I had an encounter with a big weirdo the last time, which was why it was my last. Some guy who said he had just gotten out of jail (of course, he didn’t do it - or so he said) started hitting on me and stroking my hair about 2 hours into the ride. When he sat in the seat beside me and asked me if my boyfriend would mind if he kissed me, I almost peed myself. Finally, after hour 5, I was able to get out at my destination. I hadn’t been that relieved in a long time.
I can’t imagine that a 20-year-old boy would have too much of a problem, though. And I’m betting my experience was a little out of the norm (though I’d still be more hesitant if I had a daughter and she were taking the bus).
I just remembered one of my better bus stories.
Summer of '86, I was taking the bus back to school (Madison, WI) from home (Green Bay, WI). The bus broke down in Waupun, WI, a town which is really only known for one thing: having a state prison. And that’s exactly where the bus broke down; right in front of the prison gates.
We had to hang around for about 3 hours, waiting for Greyhound to send another bus to come pick us up (our original bus had suffered something catastrophic). Fortunately, it was a beautiful summer afternoon. I started talking with two young ladies who were also on the bus. They were visiting from Argentina. Very charming, and I think one of them was interested…but, alas, they were leaving directly from Madison to go to Chicago. Ahh, the paths not taken. 
I started traveling by Greyhound when I was eighteen. I never encountered any people that completely freaked me out, but I did get invited to an orgy once by a nice Pagan boy from Ohio. I figured that he was probably full of shit, but I don’t actually know that much about Pagan celebrations. He said that there was a group at Ohio State that had a big bonfire for the Spring Equinox and it usually ended in an orgy. He was the only really note worthy person I talked to in my ten or so trips on a Greyhound.
I just looked at Amtrak’s routing. Indianapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Washington, Washington to Newport News and then a bus to Norfolk. Total time, 31 hr, 25 min including two layovers of more than 4 hours each.
And it’s more expensive. That, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with rail travel in the U.S.
Boring and smells funny. Otherwise fine. Real trouble rarely starts on the bus. Where’s the troublemaker gonna go? If you’re that obnoxious, you have at least twenty people, in a small enclosed space, all pissed off at YOU. You have to be pretty drunk to ignore that.
One tactic I used to use was to get on first if at all possible, grab a window seat, and plant my bag on the aisle seat next to it until someone who looked similarly student-y came along. Then I’d ask if they wanted that one. It kept me from having to sit next to a drunk or a screaming toddler for three hours.
There is a route that goes from Indy to Washington without requiring the jaunt to Chicago (Typo Knig did it once) but yeah, those are the problems.
We have taken the train to Florida a couple of times - and that can be a good alternatve (if you don’t get a sleeper room, it’s cheaper than flying) but aside from that, most routes are more hassle than flying. And I’m a major train buff so I’d take the train where available even with the hassle.
Re the OP: Another girl and I did the bus trip from Harrisburg PA to Durham NC when we were in college; I forget how we got from Durham to Chapel Hill (think we called a friend to pick us up). It was a pain to transfer - we had to go from Greyhound to Trailways in Washington, including changing bus stations and having our tickets endorsed at the Greyhound station (which we found out while in line for the second bus). Fortunately the two stations were right across the street from each other.
We were hit up for cash by some guy at one of the stations.
And we both reeked of cigarette smoke by the time we got to Durham, as this was before smoking bans were common. Blech!
But nothing else happened of any note.
An interesting aside: the Greyhound station we went through in DC has been converted to a high-rent office building, and I worked there for a couple of years in the late 90s. 1100 New York Avenue (I think that’s the address). It had changed quite a bit, obviously!
I had a great time when I came from Salt Lake City to New York, but I was sitting next to a cute chick all the way to Chicago.