Oops. . . yeah, just kidding. If you had worked at the bus station, I might have made the same comment about the liberry.
Oh, they totally live here at the library, they just go somewhere else at night.
I live in NYC and take the buses all the time. I’ve taken the Trailways bus to Atlantic City at least 3 times and it is always a pleasure. Well, maybe not a pleasure since there aren’t free drinks or anything but it is always a nice trip. I prefer it to flying if I can help it. I’ve never seen any vomit or stabbing on the bus, mostly just people reading books and drinking a soda or beer on the way to their destination.
I wonder why they say to fly to NYC, though - maybe it’s cheaper? I know where Mount Tremper is and if left to my own devices I’d probably fly in to Albany and drive down from there. It’s a really scenic area of the country, though going in the summer or fall would be better.
It’s a lot more expensive to fly to Albany, from what I can tell.
On the other hand, cars are cheaper in Albany.
For some reason buses have a really bad reputation. Like the people that ride them are society’s rejects, unlike the stellar class acts that fly. It’s true that a bus is going to be considerably cheaper than a plane, so the average income level of the passengers might be a little lower. But how they got the reputation of being social cesspools is beyond me. I find them to be consistently clean, comfortable, and reliable.
It’s a bus. They are just people. We still do live in a country of laws. It’s not like you are taking a camel through the hills of Afghanistan.
Really. You work in a library. It won’t be worse than that.
Or I can drive to Charlotte and fly to Albany and get a car… Christ, it sucks living by one of the most expensive airports around.
ETA - Yeah, see, I wouldn’t really like to spend a few hours sitting two inches away from my library patrons.
FWIW I went to boarding school (for high school) in upstate NY and some of the kids from NYC would take Trailways home for breaks and weekends. So these actually were teenage girls traveling by themselves. And this was a route served by Amtrak, they took the bus anyhow because it saved a few bucks.
I put my 70- something year old mom on a Trailways bus to go visit relatives one Christmas, and she worked herself up into a state of high anxiety the days leading up to the trip. We live in Upstate NY where the weather is miserable and no one caved in to her demands that someone drive her in a car. I got on the bus with her and found her a seat, and she was pleasantly surprised to see that the seat was ‘nice’, padded and upholstered; she wouldn’t have to perch on a hard molded plastic bench with homeless people drooling on her shoulder, stand up all the way holding onto a strap, and there weren’t even any crates of live chickens tied to the roof…My daughter, who also demanded someone drive her in a car back to college, unsuccessfully, learned to take the dreaded bus which dropped her off right in front of her dorm. I rode up with her once and the trip was nice and quiet, mainly because the passengers were all college students and all but three or four slept all the way back to campus…I really don’t know where this fear and horror of riding a bus comes from. You’re in as much danger packed into a steel tube flying through the air. The people are middle to lower class, economically speaking, but they aren’t joyriding on buses to cause trouble. I think it’s a ‘low-class’ thing, as if a person is taking a giant step down on the social scale by bussing it. A true American obviously deserves his or her own car! Failing that, a true American has hordes of friends and relatives agreeable to drive them in a car; next is airplanes, next is trains, and the lowly bus is at the bottom…This is dull old Upstate New York, though. I can’t speak for the conditions of bus-riding in yr big cities. (I have ridden the NY subway several times, and again, I missed the litany of horrors I’ve often heard about riding on the subway.)
Well… yeah. Here, anybody who isn’t poor (and I mean POOR poor - the city is this year going to cut 75% of the local bus system, so you best find an alternative) or a student with a bike has a car. Which means that if you’re riding the big grey dog then you’re really up against it. I realize things are different in other parts of the country, which is why I asked.
Not that I’m, you know, scared of poor people. But the cluster of dudes hanging around outside the Greyhound station is extremely unsavory.
Yeah, but most of them don’t actually ride the buses ;).
I was a teenage boy rather than a girl, but my folks did stick my 13-year old ass on a Greyhound in NYC bound for Oakland CA in August of 1981 due to the air traffic controllers strike. Other than the general discomforts of a two day ( or whatever it was, I can’t quite remember ) bus ride, including a traffic accident while crossing the Great Plains, it was resoundingly meh. The bus was clean and the clientele inoffensive - though I sat next to a series of incessantly chatty old men, none tried to grope my sweet, sweet 13-yr old self. I have also ridden Greyhounds on trips like Detroit to Cleveland or Toronto. Uniformly the most unsavory aspect were in fact the station hangers on, not the buses or the ride. But I never felt in danger, even as a youngster.
Another New Yorker here. I’ve been on Trailways plenty of times going in and out of NY and it was always a relatively pleasant ride that’s saved me a few bucks. I’ve even gone into Port Authority for non-bus related reasons such as urgently needing to go to the bathroom! So it’s not gross at all, I don’t even think it’s that crowded, and the bathrooms are, of course, clean.
I don’t think young women really have to worry at all in NYC…my parents let me go with just a friend when I was 17 and we stayed in a youth hostel…they also let me go by myself right after high school and I stayed in the same place. Even when I was 15-16, my HS would take those of us who took fashion classes to NYC and while we were technically supervised, they’d let us loose on Canal Street for a few hours, and everyone always made it back.
Good times!
I have very fond memories of taking the bus between New York (home) and Albany (school) for 4 years. Of course, that’s mostly because, if at all possible, I took the red eye, wearing my headphones, cruising along peacefully on a half-empty bus traveling along a deserted highway at flatly unsafe speeds.
Typically the bus isn’t quite that pleasant, but it’s usually ok.
Re: separate ticket counters for different bus companies, I should note that, in my experience, Greyhound/Trailways/etc. have always honored each other’s tickets. This mostly comes in handy because most people aren’t aware of it, and the line at the Trailways desk is usually much shorter than that at the Greyhound desk.
Can you locals tell me how easy it would be if I flew into Albany instead of a NYC airport with a whole 'nother connection and took the bus from there?
Of course, now that I talk about it my boyfriend wants to go too - he doesn’t want to do the Zen thing, but he wants a weekend vacation retreat to just chill in the Catskills, so maybe Albany-car would be better after all with two of us?
Does anybody have suggestions for inexpensive yet comfortable weekend lodgings in the Mt. Tremper area for him? This could end up being a very restorative useful weekend for both of us in different ways.
I have no idea about buses from Albany to Mount Tremper. Buses have a bad rep because long-distance buses – like, from LA to NYC long-distance – are indeed used mainly by people with very little money and outright lunatics, and most people’s main memories of these trips is stuff like being roused from a decapitiation nightmare at 2 A.M. and forced to wander the Tulsa bus station for half an hour while they “clean” the bus.
If you’re not going to the monastery, without a car you would be more or less stuck in Mount Tremper, which is pretty tiny. Of course, if you rent a car and it snows a ton, you will be stuck in Mount Tremper anyway. (For a day at most … your routes back to Albany should be cleared pretty quickly.)
Which airport were you planning to fly into? Keep in mind that JFK is a very long subway ride (90 minutes from what I remember) to the Port Atrocity. La Guardia is a somewhat pricey cab ride. You could fly to Newark Airport in NJ probably as cheaply as NYC and rent a car from there, possibly for less than NYC rates; the ride is 2 hours 15 minutes to the Catskills versus 90 minutes from Albany airport. Newark to the Port Authority is doable by rail but a bigger pain than from the other airports.
(You will not be murdered in any of these places. The PA is a busy shopping mall of pushy ethnic diversity, but all vestiges of that grubby Taxi Driver feeling have long been expunged. Newark Airport is safe in the middle of a swamp, you will not get carjacked in the rental agency parking lot. Frankly, the only part of this whole scenario that rings danger bells for me is the thought of a Southerner driving in the snow.) (I used to live in Texas.)
Lodging: I’ve heard mixed things about Kate’s Lazy Meadow (http://www.lazymeadow.com/), but it seems friendly and quirky and the view is nice. There are a few fancy-pants choices in Mount Tremper and thereabouts that may be very cheap in the winter. You know it will be cold, right? And there very well might be snow everywhere? There are a lot of great outdoorsy things to do up here but I don’t usually encourage friends from milder climates to visit me in February. You might end up praying at the monastery anyway.
It will be pretty, though, and probably not remind you of home.
I would highly recommend the Super Shuttle. It takes a little longer than a normal cab but it is about $15 from the airport to almost anywhere in the city.
An even closer airport to check out would be** Stewart-Newburgh**, but its commercial flight options are usually even more slim – and expensive – than Albany’s. (But again, renting a car from there would be, I’d think, relatively cheap.)
But I think the bus could be fun – lots of changing scenery (and probably a few stop-and-go traffic episodes) through the city, the Hudson Valley, and into the Catskills. Plenty of time to get some last-minute meditation practice in 
Buddhists don’t pray - they sit. One hopes there is heat where one sits.
Frankly, I would rather clean the floors at the Port Authority with my tongue than ever set foot in the Newark airport again. Those people were so rude to me when my flight from Lisbon came in too late to catch the flight home that when I took my whole seven dollars of coupon to Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs and the hotdog lady was kind and polite to me I almost cried!