Dec 30 2008
in which I go into far more detail on the annoyances of coach travel than anyone actually wants
I suppose partly I hate buses because I absolutely cannot sleep on them. And trust me, I’ve tried; my very first genuine long-distance bus trip was from Pittsburgh to DuBois this summer, when I was running on…I don’t even know, 36 hours without sleep by that point? The bus was virtually empty, as such things often are with a route like that (same for the Norwich-London route; that was just me and the driver for a while on the way back), so I did the logical thing and stretched out across a couple seats, assuming I was so exhausted, surely I’d be able to sleep.
Yeah, not so much. To begin with, two seats is only just long enough to be not long enough, and if you try to curl up, prop your feet up on the window, or just let your feet dangle, some part of your body will fall asleep, which isn’t conducive to you actually falling asleep. Propping your feet up on the seat across the aisle sort of works, at least a little longer, but you have to move every time someone wants to come by, which isn’t conducive to sleeping either. That’s if there are extra seats, of course, and my 10-hour trips to and from Edinburgh, and my I-don’t-remember-how-many-hours to and from Birmingham for the Coldplay concert, were absolutely packed without a single extra seat.
Sitting up and leaning against the window is no good; there are too many hard, sharp angles, and even if you avoid those, touching your head to the window instantly conveys every single rattle and vibration from the entire bus right into your bones, which is enough to keep you awake even if you didn’t clock your head on the window every time the bus jolts over, like, a crack in the pavement. And unlike on airplanes or even trains, there are almost never any tray tables, which for someone like me who can only do airplane-sleeping with her head on a pillow on said tray table, that’s not good.
Oh. And did I mention jolting over cracks in the pavement? Yeah, well, buses are kind of big and clunky. Every little movement seems to be exaggerated exponentially, so you’re getting jostled all the time if it’s not steadily going down the highway. Which it’s usually not since it’s always making stops along its route.
