This weekend I was headed to an art conference with some students from my class and my professor. In Pennsylvania we passed a place called Reptile Land. I look up and laugh and say "hey, it's an accredited zoo!" and a few moments later I'm being jolted forward and watching us move away from the car in front of us as it moves forward into a pick up truck. Next thing I know we're pulled over just past Reptile Land. The car's hood is crumpled and we can see the engine, the headlights are gone, the car leaking something, and it's smoking.
Thankfully everyone was fine, we weren't going fast enough for the airbags to be deployed. However I was now stuck in the middle of Pennsylvania without a ride to the conference or back to school. We waited for the state trooper for a while and the drizzle stopped. As we placed calls to people with access to the internet, car rental places, and bus companies, a full huge rainbow appeared.
Funnier yet though was that we were in front of this sign:
We are informed that there are two places to catch a bus back to school. Both are 20 minutes away, so we ask the tow truck driver where he is heading and go with him. We get to the garage and find out there is no bus station, just a "stop". We call the bus company and find out that the bus doesn't leave until the next day at 1PM. the tow truck driver's wife offered us a ride into town to a nearby hotel. I call and find out there are rooms and we drive in. At midnight that night as I'm trying to fall asleep, the door opens...the door to the room next door, however I can hear it as if it were my door. I hear two men speak as if they are in the room. I can hear them unzip their luggage and then complain about having to share a bed. Finally the next day comes and I check out of the hotel and walk downtown to buy a bus ticket. The only place that sells them: the local town tavern, which of course is not open at 10AM on a Saturday. So I go to the college's Barn's & Noble, where I am greeted by a person wearing a huge Peter Rabbit suit. I grab lunch at a local deli, which is filled with stereotypical sorority girls and jocks all still hungover from a night out. The man in front of me appears homeless and starts to chat me up, though I am not able to comprehend a word he is saying.
The bus pulls up to the side of the main street where I was told to wait. There was no bus stop, sign, or shelter. I get on and we drive what would be an hour and half by car in 2 and a half. When we get to where I have to switch stops an Amish family gets on the bus.
The gentlemen from my last bus gets on and sits right behind me. I soon find out he's an ex-convict. Awesome. Where am I from? Oh, you know, the Massachusetts area (lie). Do I live on campus? Oh, in the general area, it's complicated (lie). This continues for pieces of the almost four hour ride, which would have taken 2 hours tops by car. Meanwhile the bus driver is up front spouting conspiracy theories to the women in the first seat. Sodium florid? They put that in the water to make us dull so they can take over; like the British did in China. And the sex trade, that's run by high ranking government officials. The underwear bomber was really a government plant to get us to agree with them putting full body scanners in airports; you know, they cause radiation, right? The government is trying to kill us slowly! He had 3, almost 4 hours worth of these theories to talk and talk and talk about. When I arrived back on campus, I was more grateful for sleep than I've been for a while. And very happy that daylight savings time gave me an extra hour of it. And that as shit filled as this weekend was, it makes for an unreal and hilarious story.
