2 days. DAY to LAX. The air conditioning broke down in the heat of the summer so I waited for the next bus which pulled up empty. I was traveling with a buddy at the time and the only other people to get on the bus was a couple. They had a 12 pack of beer and we drank through the night. It was great. They went to the back of the bus and my buddy and I sat up front talking to the driver. It was at night and there was a lightening storm in the distance. We were out west with visibility of over 100 miles so it was really a spectacular light show.
Prior to that we were riding through the midwest and there was a stunning young lady in front of us. I thought she was mentally challenged because she was looking out the window with such rapt attention. She was memorized by the corn fields of Indiana and then the wheat fields of Kansas. Turns out she was a German tourist who was astonished at the seemingly unlimited amount of farmland. She spoke perfect English.
An interesting trip. Had lots of fun seeing the country that way.
Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I was traveling with a friend and, instead of the far superior train, we took a bus from Athens, Greece to Munich, Germany. QUOTE]
Heh - I’ve done that trip twice from London to Athens - three days. I’m half English and half Irish, so I just fought amongst myself I remember getting a discount ticket the second time - nineteen quid.
I went from Champaign, Illinois to a conference/bash in Fort Collins, Colorado and back with fellow vet students. I think it was an 18-hour ride each way. The outbound trip was overnight, but I could get no sleep whatsoever. At least I was with people I liked and not with screaming babies, bums, and the like.
My orchestra went on a trip to Europe, and used the same bus the whole trip (including the all-day journey from Austria to Italy I wrote about above.) We were actually instructed not to use the bus’s bathroom, because, as our tour guide put it, ‘‘anything you do in there will stay with us for the rest of the trip.’’
I’ve also been to Connecticut (and back) on a bus, on a high school band trip, though it wasn’t as long as my other trips I’ve posted about.
The longest I spent on a bus was about three days.
I rode The Green Tortise from just north of San Francisco California to just south of Seatle Washington. The company was in its infancy. It was 1977? I had just been layed of at a lumber mill in northern Calif. and had a ship building job waiting for me near Seatle Wash. I heard that The Green Tortise bus line was headed north to Seatle and it would take about three days.
I was not in a big hurry and they were much cheaper then greyhound. They also ran on highway 101 the beach route. Wonderful scenery!
It turned out to be a “hippy” bus. There were bunks in the back of the bus but that was also where the MJ was being employed. Since I had enough trouble with life at that time without dope, I sat in the front of the bus. We would stop for just about anyone or for no reason at all, just to see the scenery, play on the beach, etc. There was a communal atmosphere as we often would stop and folks would buy some food and we would all share the feast. It was a fun and eventful trip. I have lots of good memories of that trip.
It took three to four days, I caught the bus about mid morning and arrived some time in the early morning. 2:00AM ish. I would do it again. I just Googled The Green Tortise, and they are still in business. I wonder if they still have the same atmosphere.
I might make a road trip to the coast and ride with them again.
On an Indian bus! Over extremely dodgy roads, if you can call them that. ( I shiver to think about it still!) From Srinagar to Leh, high in the Kashmir region of India.
Though we had waited till June, when the passes should have cleared, we still went through ice tunnels where the snow had yet to recede. There were times when we spent a couple of hours waiting, at the narrowest parts, as it would switch direction every two hours! We stopped every night, as the roads would be impassable in the dark.
The views were spectacular, of course!
And Leh was awesome! We did not leave by bus, but the plane was also not without peril. Air India, small craft, one flight a day, cannot land without a visual, short runway with a hard bank left on take off, to avoid hitting a monastery. First day plane won’t start, second day, plane jumpstarted on the runway by a similar plane! Who knew you could even do that?
Of course, the views from the plane were even more spectacular!
Don’t ask me why, but in 1980 I took a bus coast to coast *to coast: *Greensboro NC to LA
and then LA back to Greensboro about 3 weeks later. The trip was three days and nights
each way, no stopping for the night anywhere.
I have not gone near a bus since. I don’t even want to look at them any more.
Reading about these experiences reminds me of those postwar film noirs that so often leave you with the impression that buses were the only means of intercity travel available. Characters are always meeting other characters “at the bus depot”, or dropping them off, arguing with them, or tearfully saying farewell. You never see anyone take a train or a plane, or even drive their own car very much. I imagine that’s how it was at the time–the passenger rail system was moribund and families at that time didn’t have as many cars as they generally own these days. Usually only rich people ever flew.
Longest regularly scheduled bus ride I ever took was a Greyhound from L.A. to San Diego. This was back around 1979, during my college years. In those days there were only three trains daily and I’d just missed the last one. The bus trip probably took about four hours, because we stopped everywhere. For much of the ride we didn’t even use the freeway. I’ve certainly taken longer bus rides, but they weren’t on regularly scheduled carriers.
My shortest intercity bus ride was a Greyhound local from UCSD to Del Mar, where the local Amtrak station was at the time.
When I was 4, my mother and brother and I visited my grandparents in Miami Beach, taking the Greyhound from Cleveland. This was before freeways, and the trip took 4 days in each direction. I don’t know how my mother managed such a long trip, with two kids who were 7 and 4.
Was taking a 16 hour bus ride in Northern Areas of Pakistan once. Were trapped by a landslide. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t turn around. Ended up being there for just under 24 hours, total trip time over 40 hours. Fortunately it didn’t get too cold overnight.
Spooked by this, one of our group managed to get us seats on a Pakistan Air Force Fokker on the trip back. The plane just had benches along the sides. The flight through the mountains was so scary, we were all wishing we had taken the bus.
Speaking of bus travel in the late 1950s and 1960s, I have to admit that Greyhound’s iconic Scenicruisers do look fairly comfortable, besides having a certain amount of design quality that was very au courant for the time.
The Scenicruiser was to the world of buses what the Lockheed Constellation was to the world of airplanes.
My trip from Chicago to Kansas City only takes ten and a half hours, but I take it all the time. Half the time I take it during the day and use the time for work, the rest of the time, I take the overnight bus, and via the miracle of zolpidem, I sleep through most of it.
I remember getting a discount ticket the second time - nineteen quid.
