Bus Stop

I stood in the Bus Station in Toronto this morning, waiting for an errant daughter who had missed an important bus and now had to drive all night from Washington, DC to Toronto. Her original bus was to leave, she thought, at 11:30 a.m. and really left at 10:45 a.m. and she didn’t make it. So the special $20 ticket went to $30 with an original day change, and now with a miss went up another $40. The 12 hour overnight bus was a punishment God gave for missing your original bus, and the 9:20 a.m. pickup in Toronto arrived at 11:00 a.m.

It would have been an easy hour in and an hour out if she had been on the 10:00 p.m. arrival bus originally scheduled. Now, it was an hour and a half in rush hour in and an hour out causing me to miss a funeral in the process.

What can I say? I was there and had to first go to the bus washroom, always a pleasure. It was bad, and it smelled bad. The odour of urine pervaded the men’s room and added to my already perfect day.

I bought a coffee and waited listening to my book on my MP3 player, the saving part of my ride and my wait. The daughter texted and suggested I look for food and keep busy as this was going to be long, so I eventually went downstairs again and after another quick trip to the men’s room (I never met a bathroom I didn’t like) and I found a snack bar and treated myself to a small bag of pretzels and a coke.

Back up to eat, listen, wait and observe.
In the last two times I’ve waited in the bus station I’ve seen drug deals go down, or at least I’ve perceived them as drug deals, and it could be from watching too much TV. Two different people asked me to watch their bags while they went off to do something which never will happen in an airport because they perceive this as a terrorist activity. One was a young woman and one was an elderly woman and I guess in a bus station, I fall into a reputable character category, which would not be the case in most other places. The young woman went off leaving me with her back pack and luggage, the older woman left me with luggage and worked the crowd trying to get someone to let her into the handicapped washroom which took 15 minutes to do. I don’t blame her and they sure don’t make that one easy, and she sure didn’t deserve the downstairs washroom if the ladies is anywhere near as bad as the men’s.

My daughter arrived and left me with her backpack and her luggage and went downstairs to use the washroom (there’s a theme here) and we left for the parking lot, a $17 deposit and at $5 a half hour I got no change. My car was wedged in by others and it took my daughter running from front to back to get me out of the space. This took about 15 minutes, a few inches at a time.

As one says at this kind of time, “So other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”