Date: 2005-02-01
From: The Bus

To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

I decided to take either the bus or train to Amicalola Falls State Park, the starting point of my hike. I wanted to get a fresh idea of what it takes to cover at the least the distance from New Jersey, where I was living, to Georgia, in a pretty direct way, by land. My sister, Su, said, "Take the bus; you'll see more." Well, I didn't actually see more since I took an overnight bus, leaving about 3:30 PM and getting in at about 10:00 AM, and much of it was by way of Route 95 South, but the bus trip itself was wonderful anyway. The feeling I get on a plane is something like being in an elevator, where everybody is in there together, but the protocol is to usually act like the other people don't exist. On the Greyhound bus, there was a camaraderie and friendliness among many of the passengers that made me feel that taking a long-distance bus in the U.S. was the American equivalent of staying in a youth hostel or a cheap backpacker hotel when traveling in Europe or a third-world country. People want to meet other people and talk to them. I was also motivated by a book I read recently by Jim Lehrer, "A Bus of my Own," where he talks about the small bus company his family ran in Kansas when he was a boy.I had to change buses a couple of times, so I got to sit near different people along the way, until the final, local bus, the only one that wasn't full. I started a conversation with my first seat mate, Joanne, by asking her what language she had been speaking earlier on her cell phone, if she didn't mind me asking. I thought it was Creole, and it was. She was Haitian and her husband was an Army sniper serving in Iraq. It turned into a long conversation about our lives and ideas, continuing until she got out in Richmond, Virginia.   At one point the last driver, the one driving the local route and the friendliest of the 3 drivers I had, admitted to us passengers that he thought he had left a person behind at one of the rest stops. In his defense, he always warned us how much time we had by saying, for example, "10 minutes, don't be late!" He fretted about that passenger, and we ended up teasing him about it. The man sitting in front of my was a truck driver, picking up a truck in Atlanta, his assignment to deliver it to Dallas. Because of the way the local route went, there was a place where it passed a Burger King, then turned around further on, and passed it again going in the other direction about 10 minutes later. The truck driver was hungry and worked out a deal with the bus driver to drop him off so he could run in to the Burger King for breakfast, then cross over to the other side of the road and hop back on the bus when it came back the other way. After the truck driver had gotten out, I said to the driver: "I know you secretly plan to leave him behind," and got a good laugh out of him. I shook hands with him when I got off at at Gainesville, and took a cab from there.The cab driver told me I was the first person she was bringing up to the Approach Trail in 2005. The last thing she said as I got out of the cab was "Should I say 'good luck', or 'break a leg'?" My reply: "Have fun!" 11 days later, on February 12, I met a group of 8-10 young people coming down Standing Indian Mountain, North Carolina, as I was going up. They yielded the trail to me and as I passed them I exchanged greetings with a few of them. To the last one I said "I'm heading to Maine." His reply: "Have fun!"