I just wanted to quote this for truth. At 20, taking Greyhound would have been an adventure! Heck, at 21, I took the midnight bus from Tokyo to Osaka (it was cheaper than the bullet train). Again, I was a single female, travelling alone. Your son will be an adult soon. Let him experience and do things for himself. Maturity and responsibility come soon enough and they come from doing things on your own.
I’ve only been on the Greyhound once, and to be perfectly frank, it was a perfectly miserable experience. I was trying to hitchhike from Yosemite to L.A. and gave up, and ended up taking some 2AM bus out of Fresno. Some obese person was taking up two seats, so I ended up sitting on the floor. It was still better than standing on a street corner in the shitty part of Fresno all night long.
That said, I think everyone should take the Greyhound once just to experience it. With a bit of planning, I’m sure you can arrange for a much more pleasant experience. I’ll still take the Greyhound at some point in the future. Like everyone else said, Amtrak is a pretty good way to travel, so long as you don’t have to be at your destination at any particular time.
I have been on an 18 hour bus ride from Yangon to Mandalay in Myanmar, and that trip made the Greyhound seem like flying first class.
Oh, to actually note my personal experience:
I took a greyhound from LA to San Diego and back a few weeks ago and it was fine. I left early in the morning so I could nap. The trip down was great and the only hiccup was that we got back late, but that was due to extremely heavy traffic. It was the friday before memorial day so that is not at all unexpected.
But that train doesn’t get into Washington until after the train to Newport News has departed, which leaves Vunder Bob’s son nearly 200 miles from home.
And that’s what’s wrong with Amtrak, but that’s a different thread.
Well, it depends. We traveled from Seattle to L.A. with full overnight accommodations and all food included, and it was only about $476 for the two of us. I don’t think we could have done better with one-way air tickets.
But you’re sure right about it being slow.
One way? Today you could probably get a one-way ticket from Seattle to some LA airport for $200-$300. I did a quick search on Southwest, today they had the cheapo flight for $119. Not to quibble, I know the major carriers didn’t always offer cheap 1-way flights like they do today.
I’ve taken the bus a number of times to Ottawa and Toronto, and I took buses all over Spain and Portugal. Never had any problems, not even when I found myself abruptly having to take the overnight from Barcelona to Valencia at 1:30 and getting in before the metro opened.
I’ve taken the bus from Rochester to NYC many times. And have used bus transit for other destinations. However, I’ve never done a more than 12 hour bus trip. The thing that would get to me is that I’d need at least an hour or three to walk around away from people after that long around a crowd.
I’ve never had any experience with horror stories to match what some people are mentioning. Even the one time I was on a route that had been overbooked, the bus company got the second (or was it third) overflow bus there in a short time, and I was still on-time for arrival at my destination.
The worst experience I’d ever had with riding the bus was when there was an in-trip movie on several monitors on the bus. It was Bio-Dome, and I wanted it to go away…
If possible, I’d suggest using a Trailways bus, not Greyhound - my experience was that the Trailways buses were newer, had more amenities, and were cleaner.
As for the Amtrak vs. bus thing. At the time, a round trip bus ticket was about $80 for Rochester-NYC-Rochester. (Small differences between Greyhound and Trailways, but negligible for this comparison.) Airfare, without super saver fares, was often about $180, or more. Amtrak was about the same as the air fare, but there was one train a day leaving Rochester in that direction. At 3 AM. Compared to ten to twelve buses daily leaving more or less around the clock. For some reason I chose not to take Amtrak.
At 20, sure, go for it. It’s mostly boring, but you meet some, um, characters, and HazelNutCoffee’s friends remark that it’s for ex-cons and pregnant people is really not that far off the mark from my few experiences. Every single Greyhound trip I met some wacky characters, all who seemed to want to talk to me. But, hey, it was an experience, and I appreciate it for that.
One year, I took a Greyhound from LA to Chicago (50 hours) and followed that up with one to Boston (about 24 hrs, IIRC) a week later. Coast to coast on the Greyhound. I don’t think you could pay me enough to do that today, but as a 20-year-old, it was worth it for the experience.
I say, if he wants to do it, let him do it. Nothing’s going to happen. But it is an extremely uncomfortable way of traveling if you can’t fall asleep in a sitting position (I can’t.) Even on the almost empty buses where I had several rows of seats to myself I could not find a comfortable way to sleep. I wish the US had a decent, affordable rail system. With the prices as they are, rail travel makes no sense for most trips. It’s either bus or flying.
Two words:
NEVER AGAIN!
I’ve taken Greyhound several times (albeit for a maximum trip of around 7 hours), and Amtrak about a dozen times coast-to-coast (in addition to countless shorter-distance trips on both coasts). There’s no question that the train is more comfortable, has more amenities, and has the major advantage that one can stretch one’s legs. Plus, I’ve never been in a long-distance Amtrak train that was so full that one couldn’t escape an obnoxious seatmate, even if it meant hanging out in the lounge car all night (which is the best place for social interaction anyway).
I’ll join the chorus in saying that VunderBob’s son should definitely take surface transportation, and that his wife is wrong in insisting that the kid should fly.
As mentioned in previous posts, the Indianapolis-Norfolk trip suffers in that (a) the direct Amtrak route from IND to Washington DC gets in too late for the connection to Norfolk, and (b) the alternate route – which does make the connection – requires backtracking via Chicago.
So, let’s look for a combination that combines the strengths of Greyhound (a fairly dense web of routes, with several buses per day in most cases) with Amtrak (much more comfortable and enjoyable over long distances).
Now, the cost/time calculations are going to depend somewhat upon the exact date of travel, and you’re never going to beat the $55 one-way 7-day-advance-purchase Greyhound fare, but here’s an alternate possibility (arbitrarily choosing a departure on the evening of Thursday June 26):
[ol]
[li]Greyhound departing Indianapolissup[/sup] at 7:10pm June 26, 2008, arriving Pittsburghsup[/sup] at 3:40am on June 27. Cost: $43 with 7-day advance purchase.[/li][li]Cab from Pittsburgh Greyhound station to Amtrak Station, about 1 mile, should be ~$5.[/li][li]Amtrak: enter PGH for the “Departs” field, NFK for the “Arrives” field, and June 27 for the “Departure Date”, and you should get a schedule that costs $102 one-way, and involves:[/li][ul]
[li]Capitol Limited [warning: PDF!], departing Pittsburgh PA 5:45am, arriving Washington DC 2:00pm.[/li][li]Northeast Regional [warning: PDF!] departing Washington DC 5:50pm, arriving Newport News VA 10:10pm.[/li][li]Amtrak bus (guaranteed connection) arriving Norfolksup[/sup] 10:55pm.[/li][/ul][/ol]Now, to some people the idea of a layover of nearly 4 hours is a negative.
However, Amtrak’s Union Station in Washington DC is a few short minutes’ walk from the National Mall, containing iconic national monuments and superb museums. Plus – best of all to an impoverished student – most of it is free!, since it’s been bought with the sweat and toil of the weary taxpayer. The museums are all air-conditioned (crucial in a DC summer…), but you can just wander in, look around, and leave if you want since you haven’t invested any admission fee. What I would do is walk from Union Station to the Vietnam wall, then visit Lincoln and Jefferson (ducking into museums on the way to cool down), then head back into a couple of museums until I needed to get back to Union Station.
Seriously, a layover of ~4 hours in DC is a feature, not a bug. 
It’s not like being stuck in a soulless airport. The kid is 20 years old. He has a golden opportunity to learn that travel is more than just getting from point A to point B in the fastest possible time.
In conclusion he should do both Greyhound and Amtrak IMHO, that’ll double the number of stries that he has to tell and help him choose for the future. Maybe the 8 hours from IND to PGH will make him a Greyhoundophobe. Fine, he’ll know for the future. Maybe the Amtrak trip through the beauty of Western Maryland will make him a lifelong train traveler.
If, in the future, he decides to travel farther afield in distant lands, his Indiana-Virginia adventure will stand him in good stead.
[sup[/sup]350 S. Illinois St, Indianapolis, IN 46225]
[sup[/sup]990 2nd Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15219]
[sup[/sup]215 W York Street (Stop on West Bute St. at York St. Garage), Norfolk, VA 23510]
I took several long bus trips (as in 36 hours) around ages 18 and 19. If my parents were ever concerned about that, they sure didn’t say anything - but then my folks were never what you’d call overprotective. A long ride on a Greyhound is one of those things that is brutal at the time - when you finally step off that last bus, you’ll trade all your wordly possessions for a shower - but it’s definitely something you won’t soon forget.
My favorite bus story was during a layover in D.C. Despite growing up two hours from there, I’d never been to that or any big city other than the sanitized parts of Philly. I was standing outside the terminal smoking a cigarette and watching some pigeons.
A sloppily-dressed black guy who I could somehow tell was a local was standing next to me, so I tried to make conversation.
“Man, those pigeons will come right up to you,” I said, as for the first time in my life, there was a bird on the ground close enough for me to kick it if I wanted to.
“Yeah. City birds. They ain’t scared of people,” he replied.
“He sure seems to be enjoying that pizza crust.”
“Yep. Hey, you know what else pigeons like?” he asked.
“What?”
“WEED! Wanna buy some?”
Which reminds me of another experience. Let’s just say that it’s good practice not to let people in bus terminals engage you in drug deals and leave it at that. 
Amtrak I did about three years ago from New Orleans to Harrisburg, and aside from the middle-of-the-night dining car confessionals (seriously, they’ve got some troubled souls on those trains!), I didn’t like it. It’s been mentioned in this thread that frieght lines own the rails and that you’re at their mercy. You will not forget this. If there’s a freight train that wants to use the same track, you’re going to be waiting. It’s frustrating as hell the way the train just stops dead in the middle of nowhere and nobody tells you why. You might wait there for a few minutes, an hour, two - you won’t know until the train starts moving again.
Forgot to add: I think the bus is far better than the train for actually seeing America. 90% of the time I was on that train, the only thing I could see out the window was a thick canopy of trees lining each side of the tracks. And much of the time, we were out of range of any cell phone towers. You’ll be able to use your phone just about the whole time on a Greyhound, since cell phone towers line pretty much every stretch of Interstate these days.
You got a darn good deal, I think.
My Lovely Bride and I took Amtrak for the first leg of our honeymoon (1992), from Chicago to Denver. When our fifteenth anniversary was coming around last year, I looked into trying to book a sleeper car room to replicate that trip, and I seem to recall it was going to be well over a grand.
I took a round trip ride from Dayton Ohio to Los Angeles. Didn’t realize until I read the ticket that each bus comes with a complimentary screaming baby. I would recommend the kind of headphones that cover the ear. I have to say it was fun because I got to see the country from a different perspective. One of the passengers was a beautiful young lady from Germany. I thought she was retarded because she would often sit on her knee’s and watch the scenery go by for hours. It didn’t dawn on my that seeing hundred’s of miles of cornfields followed by hundreds of miles of wheat fields was anything special. It wasn’t until I talked to her that I understood how vast the United States is. She spoke perfect English so it was some time into the conversation that I found out she was from Germany.
True story: 1977 - I was riding in a packed bus in the summer and the air conditioning went out so when they announced that another bus was coming up to assist I jumped off the bus. The next bus pulls up completely empty so it was only me, a buddy and a young couple who got on. The couple brought a 12 pack of beer and the driver let them bring it on the bus. They gave my buddy and I a couple of beers and then went to the back to party. This was at night and we were driving through the desert during a thunderstorm which was mostly in the distance. Since the visibility was something like 150 miles it was a spectacular show. So there I was, in the front seat with my feet propped up on the chrome bar drinking a beer and talking to the driver while watching the storm. I put that moment down in the category of unforeseen adventures.
I rode from Maine to Maryland when I was in my 20s. It IS boring, but I met a lot of interesting people. It’s no worse than flying, frankly, and the seats are more comfortable.
It’s been a few decades, but in earlier years I took several long distance bus trips.
I never took a single trip that didn’t provide material for a short story or something to tell as yet unborn grandkids. If you want to see a real slice of life, Go Greyhound!
Indeed we did get a good deal, not least because, departing Seattle at 10am and arriving in L.A. (late, of course), at 10:30 PM the next day, we got five dining car means included in the price–lunch and dinner the first day, and all three meals the second day. I thought the food was quite good in the way of a grill type restaurant specializing in steaks and chops. It wasn’t like a high-end steakhouse, but it was way better than a “family” joint. About the best comparison I can think of in L.A. is Musso and Frank’s. And of course it was much better than anything you’d get on a plane in coach, at least when you still got any food in coach.
I’ve used Greyhound a lot when visiting the U.S. as a deliberate decision.
I’m a Limey so it gives me the chance to see the country as it is rather then just the touristy stuff though going over the Rockies had some spectacular views and Death Valley was interesting,also you save time by sleeping while travelling.
I’ve met some great people and some very interesting characters on the buses but I’ve been lucky enough to have never met any weirdos or arseholes so far.
I believe that the driver is backed up by Federal law in his enforcement of the rules and actually saw one make an amateur rapper STFU at night as people wanted to sleep.
Personally I recommend it but I expect that the experience might be a bit more mundane for a home grown Yank.
I live in Norfolk. The bus station here blows. I’ve taken Greyhound from here up north before, and Amtrak the same routes and in other parts of the country as well. Greyhound blows.
It is smelly, slow, unreliable, and the service sucks. On one long weekend I took a red-eye to Washington, DC. Got there plenty of time before departure, or so I thought. They oversold the bus, which meant a crowd (a whole crowd!) of us got shafted while the bus had to get up to Richmond and come back. And not on normal speed neither -greyhound speed. AND their attitude was we should be grateful the bus even came back for us. Their attitude was basically “oh gee, you’re still here and it’s all our fault? Fuck you for making me have to work longer”.
If he can afford it, consider flying. Or better yet, take a train. The cost difference between bus/train isn’t that much, but the service is a BIG difference. Amtrak is cleaner, the scenery’s usually better, more room to move around (and less crowded!), the employees are usually friendlier too. And they will wake you up when it pulls into your stop.
But in the realm of life experiences, it’s probably invaluable and worth trying at least once.
Oh, my, yes! I’ve met many a world-weary drifter with a story to tell in the dining car.
Upon Preview: Antonious Block makes a good case.