Tomorrow morning I will be taking a Greyhound Express bus to a family function. Travel time from here to there will be something over eight hours. Over the last few days I have been mentally preparing for this long bus ride — planning my food menu, arranging files on my computer, making a list of all the things I plan to accomplish during this alone time — with something like a spirit of celebration.
The trip is certainly far enough that flying would seem to be in order. Yet one of the hardest things about airplane travel is the difficulty of going into your own psychological space. Just the process of getting to the plane, particularly the weird vibe around security, can dominate the experience.
But on a bus I can be invisible, unobserved, vanished into my own space, on a little zen vacation from day-to-day reality, a bubble of time to think, to create, or to simply let my mind wander.
And if eight hours is not enough time to accomplish all the things I am hoping to get done, on the bus ride back I will get another shot at it. 🙂
i love long zen rides like that. taking the train from LA to SF was not only peaceful, it was so beautiful. have fun!
Say an average of 50mph (w/stops, etc.) and that’s 400 miles or so – an hour on the plane. But that’s actual flight time; with travel to/from the airports, and all the time in check-in and security lines, and the “flight” takes perhaps five or six hours total time.
Just curious, how does the price compare? Spending an extra couple of hours to avoid the horrors of the TSA and typical airline service doesn’t sound like such a bad tradeoff.
The lowest cost round trip flight is $275, and Greyhound Express costs $42 each way. So the bus is costing me less than one third the lowest air fare.