(Detroit to Pittsburgh)
When I first visited the US in 1980, I travelled by "dog". Amtrak was a bit of a mystery to travel agents then: "You mean we still have trains?" So even getting a ticket was a bit of a challenge. So, most of my travel was on a Greyhound Ameripass. The joke among Australians travelling the buses was: "Go Greyhound and see the arse-end of America!" The fact that Greyhound stations were usually in the most unsafe and derelict part of town only enhanced (?) that image. My memories of 35 years ago are a tad fuzzy (however I do starkly remember being stuck on the full bus for two nights in the Greyhound station in Cheyenne, Wyoming due to heavy snow, and sleeping the endless miles of banal freeways...) There are some places trains still do not go, like Detroit to Cleveland to Pittsburgh, so Greyhound it is.
There's some feeling of hard-surfaced desperation in Greyhound terminals. They tend to be all 50's phoney concrete Art Deco on the outside. Inside is minimal service, steel, concrete, queues and tiles, and “comfy” steel-mesh seats, facing locked doors marked by numbers or alphabet letters. The food is unspeakable, whether short-ordered burgers or vending machined.
And it all came flooding back in pre-dawn 7am Detroit where I was scolded for having. "Too much stuff" to meet the "dog's" meagre luggage allowance, then was directed to a mob of people milling around Door 4 (with my bag, because even though it is checked and critiqued, you still have to carry your own stuff to the bus). The post-Christmas shuffling of tired kids, returning students, weary parents, badly packed Christmas presents, frail elderly and grossly overweight (will that butt really fit into a Greyhound bucket seat? Hopefully not next to mine?) was directed, school assembly-style from a bunch into a straggly single file by officious security guys barking "dog" service numbers at us and demanding to check our ID (Yep, you need proof of identity to get onto a bus in this country...).
We were then made to stand, in our "checked" straggly line to "door number four" for all of 45 minutes.
Standing in a Greyhound queue is a bit of an education in the goodwill, humour, stoicism, and plain physical poverty of some of the passengers. For many towns, even after recent cutbacks, the "dog" is the only public transport there is. It's still students-returning-to-college transport, and provides pairs of plugs at every seat for charging up "appliances". EarPods mute the actual experience. Officials seem treat the often down-at-heel customers with polite disdain.
A sixtyish, world-weary looking driver emerged after unlocking Door 4, gazed inconsolably at his potential passengers, looked as his watch, then disappeared back out of Door 4, locking us in the terminal. Some minutes later he re-emerged, clip board in hand, and commenced taking tickets, grunting and pointing at the bus, and letting us out the door to drop bags with the keen young guys who were chucking them under the bus.
Once on the bus, seats grabbed (with far less legroom than I remember, or maybe I've just grown...) the driver climbed on, dumped his clipboard, climbed off, and locked the bus door.
A few minutes later a young woman ran down the bus aisle to the door and started whimpering: "The door is closed. Why did he close the door? Can someone open the door?" Several tried and failed. She remained, whimpering, for some minutes, till the driver returned and opened the bus. She yelped and pushed past him, running back through Door 4, pushing past the queue for the Chicago bus, past the unhelpful checkin gal, past the vendomats, and out the main entrance at a sprint.
We immediately left without her. This is after the driver, grunting up the stairs, closed a Perspex security door across the aisle (to protect him from we evil passengers, it seems), grunted the usual warnings about not smoking on the bus and rest room use and who was transferring in Akron, Ohio and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Within a quarter hour a dark smell of electrical burning insinuated itself throughout the bus. Several passengers yelled out to the driver and were ignored. On arrival in Akron, he complained that no-one had warned him...
From Cleveland our driver was VerrrNEEECE!!! She was relentlessly perky and SHRIEKED down the microphone at us to "AROUSE YOU FROM YOUR SLUMBERS" so passengers could escape at the correct community. On this trip I was wedged between a corpulent law student (who was relentlessly Facebooking for some hours and invading my limited space over and under the shared armrest somewhat alarmingly). I dozed fitfully to iPod classical music in the vain attempt to imagine being somewhere less constricted..... Until VerrrrNEEECE!!! shrieked our arrival in YoungsTOWN!!! ...dozing again until VERRRNEEECE!!! Did her shrieky thang again for my stop.
As I recovered in the depressing cafe, in the more depressing Pittsburgh Greyhound terminal, eating an even more depressing alleged chicken sandwich (I know... But it was after 3 and the buses don't cater en-route like civilised trains), I was approached by a seedy and gormless looking not-quite-able-to-grow-a-beard-yet young bloke: "Can you tell me where to go for the Baltimore bus? You see, I've never travelled on the bus before and don't know what to do." I hardly knew where to begin...
As I left the Greyhound station behind, dog tired, for the long rainy trudge up Grant St, I was grateful: the rest of North America will be travel on Amtrak and VIA rail. No more "doggy" days...
And Pittsburgh is a bit of a surprise. Compared to the neglect, arson and devastation of Detroit, and the downtown civic pride of Cleveland (sited on perhaps one of the ugliest industrial rivers in the world, but with some of the best pre-war civic suburban planning in the sumptuous Shaker Heights), Pittsburgh is several deep majestic river valleys, a flat high-rise down town, lines of two-storeyed wooden houses clinging to ridges along narrow red-brick streets the remnants of once huge iron and steel industries. After an unseasonably warm morning (about 12 degrees: no snow or rain, while the South of the US suffered hurricanes, the Midwest suffered rainstorms and floods, and the Northeast had its first winter snow and ice) I spent the morning on the southern hills, and the rainy afternoon in the Andy Warhol Museum.
I stayed out of town in Mt Lebanon, a rather twee village with too many day spas for its own good, and only 20 scenic minutes down the hills and across the river to downtown on the "T" light rail. The hotel concierge had been to Australia on a church tour to Melbourne: "I've been to Sydney. We didn't get to the Blue Mountains but we stayed in a gated community in Blacktown with its own church."
And in the Lebanese restaurant across the road, Rosemount Shiraz was six bucks a glass.