The Greyhound Adventure

I've seen it in some of the movies, when the actors take the Greyhound bus when going on intercity or interstate trips within United States. And so the idea of going to San Francisco, CA via the Greyhound bus appealed to me. I wanted to experience one of the all-American way of public transport.

They have a website to book online but due to my lazyness and also perhaps because I wanted this trip to be spontaneous, I did not book online and decided to just purchase the ticket on the counter, an hour before the ideal schedule I wanted. From the little inquiries I got, the bus route would not be scenic anyways so I thought I might as well take the night trip on Dec 17th and arrive in San Francisco at 7am the following morning.

This was the schedule I intended to get:

When I told my Uncle (who I'd be staying with in San Francisco) about taking the Greyhound bus, he seemed worried. He told me to sit at a seat near the driver, be very careful and be very alert at all times. I am used to long bus travels from my Singapore-Malaysia travels and so I thought an intercity bus in the USA would be similar and so there was nothing to worry about. But oh boy, I was not ready for what I was about to experience.

The bus from Riverside that was supposed to leave at 8:45pm for LA was 45 minutes late. The ticketing office in Riverside closes at 7:30pm, so I had to take my chance and purchase from the bus driver a ticket to LA if there were seats available. So my assumption that the bus was starting from Riverside was obviously wrong, the bus started from another city. When I got to LA, all the seats for the 11:35pm bus were taken and the next earliest available bus would leave LA at 2am and would arrive in SanFo at 1pm. I had no choice so I took it. But at least there was some unexpected advantage (to my amazement): the tickets were waaay cheaper over the counter than from online!

My ticket itinerary showed:

We arrived in Fresno, half an hour ahead of schedule. From there I had another bus transfer..to a what they call a local bus. Unlike the bus from Riverside to LA and LA to Fresno which was the usual 56 seater big bus, this local one was smaller and older. The seats are not as comfortable and most are already broken (i.e. stuck in reclined position). But what really caught me off guard was the "hidden layovers" in that itinerary because from Fresco to San Francisco, I think we almost stopped at each city we passed by for 5-10minutes each to pick up/load off passengers.

So this was what actually happened:

We did arrive on schedule in San Francisco but I was freezing the whole time from Fresno to San Francisco because the bus heater was not working! Anyhow, let's see what was my total travel time including the waiting time: 8pm to 1pm would be...16 hours!!!

That is almost the same travel time on a flight from Singapore to Los Angeles!

Going back from San Francisco to Riverside on December 22, I thought it would be a breeze, because I got the express ticket:

Then from LA to Riverside:

I did not anticipate that it would be a very packed weekend as it was the last weekend before Christmas and everyone was going somewhere. So you could imagine how there were A LOT of passengers that for the SanFo to LA bus 11pm departure, they had to have 3 buses to accomodate all the passengers (2 buses were chartered buses). The trip from San Francisco to LA arrived 30 minutes ahead of schedule. However, the trip to LA from Riverside was something that was unbelievable. I thought I was only going to have to endure 3 hours of wait for my bus but at 10am the boarding door for my bus has not opened, meaning there was still no bus for my route. At 11am finally, they boarded us. However, besides being late, they did not at all follow the scheduled route. I should be in Riverside by 11:40am but with the route they made:

Los Angeles to

Hollywood to North Hollywood to

Glendale to Pasadena to

San Bernardino to Riverside

it took me 3 hours to finally reach Riverside. That's another 16 hours of total travel time!!!

Taking the Greyhound bus was indeed one heck of an adventure. It was not at all what I expected, I had underestimated its challenge but I can proudly say that I was able to go through it, I did it! Just like a local! I can't really say that I am regretting choosing to take the Greyhound bus, for after all, this experience made me see a lot of the places in California, it made me learn new things about people, culture and meet another face of reality in United States...but let's just say that this is one of the things that I wanted to try and have tried that now I would say that once is just enough. ;)