[78-L] ARSC^

[DanKj]

   I took 2 or 3 round-trips on Megabus tween NYC and Buffalo, about 3-4 years ago ... each trip was quite pleasant, one of 
them cost $1 each way and another was $24 or so..  Buses very clean, no diesel smells, hardly any noise.  One driver treated 
my broken-legged self like a king, making sure I got the front seat all to myself, putting my bag up for me, etc.  They even 
had free internet service - slow but free, and AC plugs.  On one trip, there were hardly any passengers besides me and a 
dozen girls travelling in a pack. They brought "Sex and The City" DVDs, which the driver gladly played on the TV system.  7 
hours of that was a bit much - good thing I had earplugs!    The Buffalo-NYC trips actually start in Toronto, so there's 
usually a load of Canucks who get off at the airport. Those buses were nearly new, then - maybe they're filthy roach-motels 
by now.

 The last time I took Amshak to New York WAS the 'last time'.  Train was almost 2 hours late getting to Buffalo, then every 
freight train was put ahead of us all the way to NYC, making an eight-hour trip into 14. Nasty (and I mean NASTY) employees 
made onboard life miserable. The Penn Station elevators and escalators were all dead, too, just to end a rotten trip 
appropriately !   The return trip was 4 hours late, as I recall - they used us to rescue another train with a burned-out 
engine. (Just checked the status of those trains for the last few days, and many were on-time or even early. Glad to see 
they've improved)



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Lennick" <dlennick at sympatico.ca>
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2011 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: [78-L] ARSC^


> Ah, the good old days. My wife and I regularly used Greyhound and Gray Coach
> (long gone, I believe) when travelling to Montreal and to New York, and the
> smell of diesel is still a nostalgic one. And I'm happy to leave it at that.
>
> My first trip to New York in 1968 was by bus both ways. Coming back, I had a
> pile of records (so what else is new?) that I put on the rack and covered with
> a newspaper. Customs barely looked..on the other hand, they herded every black
> passenger off the bus at the Peace Bridge and did detailed inspections.
> Interesting.
>
> dl
>
> On 5/5/2011 11:44 PM, Philip Carli wrote:
>> Ecch and double-ecch.  I'm with you on that.
>>
>> One trouble with buses in my recent experience is that many bus travellers seem to give even less of a cuss about 
>> courtesy than air travellers; the last time I took a Greyhound, contempt and desperation hovered like a cloud over the 
>> whole company, and some smokers tried to light up despite the driver's draconian warning that he would pull over and 
>> leave them in a cornfield east of Nowhere.  An obviously disturbed woman was forcibly placed in the seat adjacent to me 
>> because she had started yelling from her original seat "I ain't sittin' next to no junkie" over and over.  When she sat 
>> next to me she rocked and swayed back and forth, tonelessly humming and writing in very small script on an 
>> already-scribbled notepad.  I had to take a bus because it was logistically the only way I could get to where I needed 
>> to; logistics take a back seat to finances for most bus travellers, though, as many can't afford anything else and are 
>> compelled to travel that way.  Greyhound does very little to make the experience at all dignified, which might inspire 
>> people's better natures. It's a hard life to depend on buses for long-distance transport.