We’ve driven to Colorado many times, and Kansas is very tedious to drive through. So I thought — especially since at one point it looked as though I might be going on my own — that I would travel by Greyhound. Travel through the night, sleeping, have a few hours in the morning to read and knit, and the trip would be a breeze.
That’s how it was on the way out. Can you tell that they’re showing movies?
But on the way back we got stranded on a street corner in the rain when the bus driver, having taken our tickets and let us on the bus, changed his mind and threw us off because there were too many passengers. The boys rescued us and the people at Greyhound, having suggested that we buy new tickets, told us that “9 out of ten times” the driver would let us on the bus the next day.
Accordingly, we went out at 4:40 a.m. and indeed the driver let us on the bus after hearing our sad story. In Denver, after I had once again gone through the sad story, they reissued our tickets to Kansas City. We were in fact put on a bus to Salina, where we transferred to a bus to K.C. Arriving there, we learned that there was no bus home. We had missed the connection completely, possibly because our driver got lost along the way a couple of times.
Our daughter rescued us and we tried again the next morning and made it home just about 24 hours after we had expected to be there.
Along the way most of the staff behaved as though we were prison inmates whose crimes were so heinous that we didn’t deserve bus tickets. There were exceptions, but not many. I’m not sure what they do to the Greyhound staff to make them hate passengers so much. Or what the passengers, crazed by the impossibility of getting a seat on the bus, have done to make the staff hate the passengers. It could go either way.