Okay, let my start out by saying that this is probably one of the stupidiest things I have ever done. No, really, as much as I love the car, only a fool buys a car off of eBay that’s 1186 miles away, and then drives it back. I was very lucky to make it back, considering what all could have gone wrong. I mean, the car’s 35 years old, has probably well over 100,000 miles on it (the odometer currently reads just over 30,000, which could be accurate since the car does have it’s original spare). Thankfully, I’ve managed to figure out how to take the price of the car, the tickets, and every other expense for this Quixotic endeavour off on my taxes. Now, I’m going to have to split this narrative up in sections since, it’ll be too long for the board to accept in a single post, so if you want to skip over the narration and head directly to the pics (which won’t make much sense without the narration, I’m afraid), you can go here. Of course, if you do that, then decide that the pictures don’t make any sense, come back here, read the narration and then go back and click the image links, you’ll suck up the microscopically small amount of bandwidth that my free image account is allowed, and no one else will get to see the images. So make up your mind now as to what you’re going to do, and then stick with it.
Let me also say that Vivitar ViviCam digital cameras are crap. Not that it takes bad pictures, it doesn’t, when you can get it to take pictures. That’s the problem with the thing. It has two buttons on the rear one which turns the thing off and on and handles the timer and lets you cycle through half the menu options. The other button handles the flash, deleting your photos, indoor or outdoor exposure, and the other half of the menu options. There’s also a delay in getting the camera to do anything when you push a button, so you’re never really certain as to what setting you’ve got the thing (or even if it’s on) in, and you’ve only got 60 seconds from when you turn it on to take a picture or it shuts itself off “to save power.” :rolleyes: On or off that thing sucks batteries dry like a high dollar hooker, so why they bothered to put a “power saving” mode on it is beyond me. Now, if you’re sitting around the house, trying to take staged photos this isn’t much of a problem. However, if you’re trying to take pictures of things out in the real world, more specifically, if you’re trying to take pictures out of a moving vehicle you’ll have a much more satisfying experience if you smash the camera with a cheap, disposable film camera, and use that to take your pictures with. So, when I got home and uploaded the pics from the camera to my PC, I discovered that about half the photos I’d taken contained such stunning vistas as this. Worthy of Ansel Adams at his finest, doncha think? 
Add to that, my stupidly packing my camera with the extra batteries in the most inaccessable part of my backpack, so that I had to wait until I got on the bus to dig out the camera, and I didn’t think to do that until after I had passed one of the most interesting sites I saw on the trip (more about that later), and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of blurry pictures or no pictures at all. I also didn’t take too many pictures of the folks I saw along the way, since I didn’t think it’d be too nice of me to post them on the internet with snarky comments.
With the excuses out of the way, on to the trip. I spent three hours in the Nashville Hellhound station waiting for the bus. Not because it was late (that came later), but because the only way I could get to the station was to have a friend of mine drop me off on his way to work. Surprisingly, the station wasn’t in the middle of an area which looked like Baghdad this time. I last took a bus in 1987, and both the station and the area around it looked like a warzone.
About an hour before the bus was scheduled to arrive, a blind guy and his female traveling companion came into the station to wait on their bus (sadly, the same one I was going to be riding). As the blind guy’s traveling companion tried to guide him to a seat, she kept saying things like, “See, it’s to your left.” and “See, there’s this TV.” Finally, he snapped, “I don’t see! I’m blind, remember!” After they got settled in, he apologized. Frankly, I don’t think that he needed to do so.
After that, a guy about 22 years old plunked down next to me and started talking to me. He’d been stuck waiting outside the station all night, because when he tried to get on the bus the night before, the security guard smelled alcohol on him and kicked him out of the station. Then, while he was waiting for the bus, a couple of homeless guys tried to mug him for his garbage bag filled with clothes. He became my single serving friend for the trip.
He was only passing through Nashville, on his way home to Portland from the Carolinas. He’d moved out there with a friend of his, to start a business buying up foreclosed properties and reselling them. That turned into a deal where he did all the work, and his friend kept all the profits, so after about a month of this, he called the folks, and they sent him a bus ticket home. So he stuffed his clothes into a trashbag and headed back. Frankly, I’d have rather walked.
When we piled onto the bus, I grabbed a seat close to the front, since I figured that the Amish gentleman behind me wouldn’t cause too much of a ruckus. (I talked to him a couple of times when we stopped, very nice guy.) Unfortunately, that meant I was sitting close to the blind guy, who talked almost incessantly with the driver, when his traveling companion wasn’t narrating what was passing by. (“It’s a cornfield!” “There’s some cows, and they’re grazing.”) Although, I did get some relief eventually.
Now, for reasons known only to Hellhound, they routed the bus through Clarksville. When we got off the exit, I noticed row after of row of identical steel sided buildings. Now, everyone always complains about stripmalls and chain stores reducing America to a bland, homogenous landscape, but these were all family owned companies that I saw, and not the latest crop of Mega-Lo-Marts or whatever.
Even more entertaining was the “Historic River District” in Clarksville. I’ve no idea what was so historical about it, since the oldest buildings I could see appeared to date from the 1950s at the earliest. Generally, when I think of something as being historical, I think of it as dating from around the 1920s or before.
It was on the way out of town, that I saw something, which later inspired me to dig out my camera. You know, long after we’d passed it, and I couldn’t take a picture of it. On the opposite side of the road was the remains of a nasty accident. No idea of what happened, as there was only one vehicle visible. It was a Chevy Caprice (note, not the one pictured, but the same body style) which literally had the entire front half of the car flattened. It looked like someone had driven a steamroller over the front end, and then backed it off. In some ways, I felt sorry for the owner of the car (I’m assuming he survived since the interior of the car wasn’t covered with blood), since he’d obviously spent a lot of money on the car. New paint, new wheels, new interior, and who knows what else. Of course, in other ways, I was glad the car was totaled, because it had been painted a hideous safety cone orange with a canary yellow interior and the world was spared from a rolling eyesore.
Our next stop was Evansville, IN, and if I’d had sense, I’d have taken pictures of the station, since it dated from the 1930s or so, and while tiny, it was in pretty good shape. The only thing it needed was the brass polished, and it would have looked as it must have in Hellhound’s glory days.
Overall, the whole trip to St. Louis (where I had to change buses) was pretty quiet (at least when the blind guy and his traveling companion were sleeping ;)). Before I had left on this trip, everyone was telling me that I was incredibly calm for someone about to undertake such an endeavour. Mind you, I was panicking on the inside. Especially, after I figured out that I most likely wasn’t going to have enough money to make it back. If nothing went wrong, gas was no more than $2.00 a gallon, and the car got 18 MPG, I’d be able to make it. However, I figured with my luck, that the car would die on me in Godforesaken, KS, and I’d spend the rest of my days living in the car, waiting for some passing motorist to come and rescue me.
