[img]396|left|Alex Campbell||no_popup[/img]Dateline Boston — Recently I made three new friends in Burlington, Vermont. I had just spent a couple of days with my friends Emily and Paul. They brought me to the Greyhound bus station at the airport, where I was to catch a bus going home to Boston. We arrived at about 10:30 a.m. for a bus that was scheduled to leave at 11:15. I bought my ticket, and we went outside to wait.
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I had all I needed for my 4½-hour trip: New novel, snack, magazine, notebook, iPod. Emily, Paul, and I chatted while we waited. At 11:15, we all peered down the road for the oncoming bus. Usually it arrives a few minutes early to let passengers on so it can leave at the appointed time.
But 11:30 came and went. Hmm. I noticed a few women talking about the bus. At 11:45 I said to them, “I’m going in!” One of them said she already had gone in, and the lady at the ticket counter wasn’t very helpful. We chatted for a few minutes, and I went in around 12:15.
The woman behind the counter didn’t know where the bus was. She had told someone that drivers weren’t allowed to talk on the phone while driving. “Give me a break,” I thought, “Pull over and tell people where you are.” There was a bus driver standing there, and he said, “The bus that came yesterday was four hours late!” As if I should count my blessings because ours was only an hour late? I told Emily and Paul to go and get lunch; I’d deal with Greyhound. They wished me luck and left.
There was a nun waiting, and she started to get anxious. She asked if she could use my cell phone. I dialed the number for her, and when she was finished, she tried to give me money for using my phone. Of course I refused—taking money from a nun? She tried again, then finally relented, saying, “I’ll say a prayer for you.” Hey, can’t get much better than that.
At 1 o’clock, a couple of us tried to call customer service for some answers, to no avail. I stood with the three women I had been talking to, complaining about the bus service, or lack thereof. We all talked about where we had to be. One of the women said, jokingly, “We could rent a car and get there faster than the bus.” Then we looked at each other and said, “Do you want to rent a car?”
Saying it out loud was all it took; at 1:15, two hours after our scheduled bus departure, the four of us rented a car, with no bus in sight. I went up to the Greyhound ticket counter one last time and told the lady, who looked like she was near tears, “You know, a little bit of information would have been helpful.” She replied, “I told someone to pass the word down that the bus was late.” Oh, man, that got me mad. I said, “That’s not our job. That’s your job. Another thing, it would be nice if someone said, ‘I’m sorry.’ No one has said ‘I’m sorry.’” She replied, “I’ll pass that along.” Can you believe it? I gave the woman the words, and she still didn’t say she was sorry!
We four women introduced ourselves and got into the rental car. Marcia, 67, was driving. She was a retired pastor who was on a book tour. Nancy, 66, was a botanist. She was going home to New Hampshire. Lorrie, 59, was born and raised in Vermont. She was going to her daughter’s house in Massachusetts for the day and was returning home the next day. In gathering information about everyone, we discovered that all three of my travel companions were born in September! I was the baby of the bunch, at 42.
Well, we ladies, The Greyhound Four, as I’ve dubbed us, had the best road trip ever. We talked about our occupations, kids, college, relationships, divorce, families, and the letters we would be writing to Greyhound. We talked about trust, the kindness of strangers, how crazy and yet “just like us” it would be to rent a car with three people we didn’t know. None of our friends would be surprised.
We all let our significant others know what we were doing. Mine said, “What? Three strangers?!” Lorrie asked, “Did you tell him how old we were?” I did, and that calmed him down.
We dropped Nancy off at a truck stop in New Hampshire and Lorrie around the corner from her daughter’s house. Marcia and I made it to the airport in Boston, where we dropped the car off and were picked up by our respective people.
What a great adventure. Sure, I spent a little more than I had planned to for my return trip, but the company I kept was well worth it. Making new friends and having a reliable and more than comfortable ride was, as they say, priceless.
Ms. Campbell may be contacted at campbellalexandra@hotmail.com
