Going Home

Travel Stories: The Greyhound bus takes 51 hours to get from Los Angeles to Winnipeg, just enough time for Stephen Hunt to rediscover a little human decency

Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Thursday, August 9, 8:30 a.m.

The terminal at Sioux Falls is straight out of an early ‘60s desegregation movie. An outtake from “In the Heat of the Night,” maybe: long, wooden aisles, vending machines, a lonely corner ticket counter, walls bare except for a clock and a couple Go Greyhound posters.

There’s a forty-minute layover until the bus leaves for Fargo. It’s breakfast time.

“Excuse me,” I say to a woman at the counter. She’s about thirty, with glasses and long brown hair.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Do you know where I might find a quick cup of coffee?” I ask, waiting for her to direct me to the nearest coffee shop.

Instead, she says, “I’ll get you one.”

What was that? A sneak attack of Human Decency?

She disappears into a back room, from where I hear her ask, “Do you take cream?”

“Black,” I say, “Black is great.”

A cup of coffee and a set of brushed teeth later, we are back on the bus, hurtling through the prairies towards Fargo. Oddly enough, Dale is back on my bus. After having last seen him in Omaha, he’s now right across the aisle from me, spewing a stream-of-consciousness at a couple North Dakota spinsters who appear thrilled to be engaged in conversation with a man.

I flip open a paperback copy of Robert Crais’ novel “Demolition Angel” and read.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is reading paperbacks on long, meandering Greyhound bus trips. The bus, with its days-long rides across thousands of miles of interstate highway, puts me in a kind of trance, blesses me with a focus that real life rarely affords anymore. On a bus, the endless and relentless distractions of real life are nowhere to be found.

There’s just you, a highway, and fifty hours to kill.

The bus drives north, and the landscape grows sparser. There’s a Twins baseball game on my Walkman that fades in and out as we pass through one honky-tonk North Dakota small town after another.

The bus stops over in Fargo for an hour, then resumes its northward journey. Despite the fact that Greyhound trips are broken into one long, consecutive chunk of travel time—fifty hours, in this case—they are really four or five smaller journeys strewn together. You don’t necessarily get sleep deprived, either. I’ve found that often, I spend whole twelve-hour chunks of travel in a semi-coma, as if drugged. Riding the Greyhound, you finally begin to understand what Janis Joplin meant when she said, “It’s all the same fuckin’ day anyway.”

There’s a half-hour rest stop for dinner in Ogalla, where I go for a walk across a bridge that spans a dried-up riverbed. It’s seven o’clock at night, the temperature still around 85 degrees. I walk past rail yards, trying to remember what’s significant about Ogalla, when it hits me: Ogalla was made famous in “Lonesome Dove” because it was where Gus McCrae’s long-lost love Clara lived. Ogalla, from what I can tell, hasn’t changed much. It still seems lonely, a place young people yearn to escape, same as the way I yearned for most of my youth to get out of Winnipeg. It’s odd how you have to get back on the bus to recall those feelings, to be able to connect the dots that led you to Los Angeles.

Winnipeg, Manitoba
Thursday, August 9, 8 p.m.

They don’t have my bag. “Oh, that happens all the time at Customs,” a guy explains. “They pull the bag and it crosses on tomorrow’s bus.” Too bad for me. At eleven the next morning I have to leave town to play golf all weekend. My bag, it turns out, gets re-routed to Toronto, and doesn’t show up in Winnipeg until Monday morning at nine o’clock. By that time, I smell like hell.

This was the slow way home, that’s for sure. But know what? Who gives a damn? Who was it that decided “slow” was a bad thing? There are a lot of things that improve, the slower you go. Maybe not the economy. But maybe we’ve spent far too long confusing “the economy” with “our lives.”

Sadly, maybe it takes planes exploding into skyscrapers to recall that they’re two entirely different things.


Tags: Budget Travel, Bus Travel, Coffee, Greyhound, Road Trips, North America, Canada, United States, Nebraska, South Dakota

Stephen Hunt is a longtime traveler currently seeking the road out of L.A. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Press, Toronto Globe and Mail, Shift, Saturday Night Magazine and other publications.


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