Rules for riding, surviving a long bus ride

I’ve got a prediction. In five years, we won’t remember Steven Slater. If you haven’t been paying attention to this “vitally” important story, he’s the 38-year-old flight attendant, who reportedly freaked out after getting hit in the head with an overhead compartment.

I've got a prediction.

In five years, we won't remember Steven Slater. If you haven't been paying attention to this "vitally" important story, he's the 38-year-old flight attendant, who reportedly freaked out after getting hit in the head with an overhead compartment. Enough has been said about Slater to fill a year's worth of columns, so I don't want to say anything about him directly, but he is an interesting case study in the interesting things travel brings out in people.

Growing up, I always thought travel was romantic. I lived in a small town in New Hampshire where driving the hour to Worcester, Mass., to visit my grandparents was a major excursion. I could hardly imagine spending five hours in a car to travel across a state. The majority of my extended family never left a 30 mile radius of Worcester, and the few who did were accompanied by wild tales.

So all my ideas about traveling came from the place most people get their ideas about things they don't experience - fiction. Sure Steve Martin and John Candy have some wacky hijinks in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," but in the end they're both OK and they've had this amazing experience and life always ends better.

Now, the first time I really traveled was when I decided to go to school in Iowa. Don't ask me why I decided to go to school in Iowa. For some reason, it seemed like a good idea at the time. (It wasn't.) But my mom, my sister and I decided to take the bus to get me to school.

When we got on the bus, we were prepared. My mom brought some peanut butter sandwiches, some fruit and some water. We thought we'd go the 36 hours on the bus and it wouldn't be a problem. I mean the bus would stop somewhere near a fast food restaurant. It had to. We saw them all the time on the road.

This is when I learned the first rule of riding the bus. Bring more food than you think you'll need. In fact, bring a lot more, because the bus isn't going to stop anywhere nice, and hope your driver smokes, because you might not get off the bus otherwise.

So we're on a day-and-a-half trip with probably a dozen sandwiches for three of us, and we're rationing them out because we realize we're not stopping until we reach the transfer station in Chicago.

The second rule of riding the bus is don't expect to sleep if you're taller than 5 foot, 7 inches. You won't. Instead you're likely to spend most of the night having the person in front of you trying to force the back of their seat through your knees. Do not cave on this though because if you do, you will spend the rest of the trip with your legs spread. It's better to have bruised knees than to try to figure out how you're going to sit comfortably with your legs at a 45-degree angle.

The third thing I discovered riding the bus was almost every bus station in any major city is in the worst part of town. Expect homeless people trying to bum change. Expect to stay where you are. Hope the vending machines still work, and don't go wandering around.

After nearly two days without a decent meal, the three of us rented a motel room, ordered pizza and slept. We didn't scream. We didn't go hijack the driver. I didn't even tell the person in front of me that my knees are permanently attached to my body and two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. We did what most people do. We persevered. Not that I'm talking about Slater at all.

Cameron Probert is the Columbia Basin Herald county reporter. Coworkers are leery of traveling with him because all of his travel tales are cautionary ones.