page_title: Green Tortoise
section_title: Description and destinations
hierarchical_section_title: Green Tortoise / Description and destinations
caption_attribution_description: Green Tortoise bus No. 308, built by Motor Coach Industries (MCI).
context_page_description: Green Tortoise Adventure Travel is an American long-distance tour bus company founded by Gardner Kent in mid-1973 and based in San Francisco, California. It provides tours in North America, mostly within the United States. It operates a bus line, and hostels in Seattle and San Francisco. The company caters particularly to backpackers, both from the U.S. and abroad.
context_section_description: The company's buses are fitted with bunk beds so that passengers can lounge or sleep while the bus is moving. This is done at night so that a destination can be reached in the morning. The company aims to foster a social environment among its passengers, who work together to cook most meals, which are often vegetarian. There are usually opportunities for camping during a trip. Itineraries typically try to avoid heavily touristed locations, and prioritize places of natural and cultural interest such as national parks, monuments, forests, hot springs, or archaeological ruins.
  Green Tortoise has historically made trips to destinations in the United States including Alaska and regular summer coast-to-coast routes from San Francisco to Boston and back. Special trips are also arranged to festivals every year, including a Mardi Gras trip to New Orleans, the Oregon Country Fair and Burning Man, where they also operate a shuttle bus from the event into nearby Gerlach and Empire, Nevada. Trips outside the U.S. have included Mexico (including the Yucatán Peninsula and the Baja California Peninsula), Guatemala, Belize, and Canada.  The company discontinued its regularly scheduled service between San Francisco and Seattle via Eugene and Portland in 2001, in favor of focusing on "adventure camping trips".
  In 1992, the company's annual revenue was around $1.4 million.  It had 50 employees and a fleet of 10 buses at that time, with a bus-renovation garage in Lowell, Oregon.  In 2004, the fleet was still mostly made up of 1950s ex-Greyhound buses and 1960s ex-transit buses, but at least one or two new 1990s highway coaches had been added.
caption: A newer Green Tortoise coach in 2007
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