The trip back began enjoyably enough down Route 17 through Myrtle Beach, Georgetown, Charleston and Savannah. I would have taken the south to be largely old plantation areas now under intensive cultivation. In fact, the highway anyway runs through hundreds of miles of scrub or semi-arid pine forest. Perfect terrain for invasions, marches to the sea, that kind of Civil War stuff. It would be just possible to gallop a horse between the trees, a dumb move anywhere else.Where ocean ports exist, the cities seem prosperous. Everything looks modern and downtown, expensively restored. The bus depots are not in the best neighborhood so I got to see some of the side streets and buildings. Myrtle Beach is small and Georgetown is what you’d call stately. Charleston would be a place to spend a week, although it is miles from the ocean.
The real treat is Savannah. Town center is just a few minutes walking distance and you have no idea how much I miss seeing pretty girls in the streets. That is something never seen in Florida, Seattle and Los Angeles. Other places, I don’t know, but Savannah is clearly a place where women can walk down the sidewalk without being grossed out. I strolled along Montgomery Street to an area closed to traffic. There were hundreds of people out in the sunshine and I gathered the perfect weather is normal for this time of year.
That is why you get two photos today. This is Market Street [in Savannah]. There was a 35 minute layover in the bus schedule, so hoofed around to see what I could. I grabbed a bagel and some coffee and saw a gal that was the spittin’ image of Robynette, my former. I had to double-time it back to the bus depot as the planned overnight stay in Savannah was just unaffordable this time around.
There is not a happy ending and I am only going to devote a few minutes to the problem. While Greyhound has new and better seating, it became all too clear that company is still run by the same “not my fault” inbred bastard-rats as twenty years ago (the last time I rode the bus). They seem to have a mania about preventing your trip from being too much fun. When I returned to the station, it had been announced that the connecting bus would be late. That, in itself, is fine, but not how they acted.The staff is not to blame since they are only as informed as management allows, but nobody would tell the roughly 80 people in the waiting area anything accurate. They refused to say when the bus would arrive and there was only seating in the terminal for 16 persons. Worse, a few of the staff insinuated the delay was due to “Spring Break” (this took Greyhound by surprise?). It was a lie anyway, for there were no students on the bus, seven other half-empty coaches came and went during the wait, and trust me, any real students would be surprised to learn of any wild parties in Savannah, Georgia.
There was no food in the terminal except salty chips, a 20 oz. soda was priced at $2.25 and since there was no time estimate, most people could not leave even for a moment to cross the tracks to the nearest food mart. They wound up standing there for several hours. The overhead speaker system was out of order, but even so, somebody could have stood on a chair and kept us informed. Instead, they ignored the plight of the people. When I finally asked why they would not turn up the television, they said it was hooked to the speaker system, which was another lie because the television had huge built-in speakers.
Now I was well-equipped with earplugs, inflatable pillow, reading material, puzzles, lots of quarters and a warm jacket. (I’ll tell you in a moment how Greyhound even screws that up). About the only thing I didn’t have was a DVD player and a season of the “Sopranos”. It is the others you should feel sorry for, the mothers with children, the people missing connections, the people running out of money. I accept that the clientele are not rich, but Greyhound seems deliberate in treating them like second-class citizens.
The bus then takes us to Jacksonville, where they pull the same stunt again. Everybody off the bus while it sits there empty for the next two hours. More lame excuses, although they did say there was no driver or that the driver was “on a 30 minute break”. Nonsense, if you add up the Savannah wait plus travel time, they had over five hours to call somebody out before we arrived. Nor, apparently, did Greyhound call ahead about the delay, so many people’s rides gave up and left by midnight. Lots of stranded people.
If Greyhound had the decency to say the first delay would be nearly three hours, I could have seen a lot more of Savannah. This situation called for a manager or supervisor to come down to the terminal with explanations. Greyhound ignored everybody. Let me tell you another item that should finalize in your mind what kind of low-life grunts Greyhound consists of. When we finally were on the road, all the drivers turned off the reading lamps despite howls from the passengers. When asked, the drivers said [they turned off the lights] because “it was dark out”. No comment.
