Greyhounding

Outraged at escalating gas prices? Tired of being denied the pleasures of great landscapes because you have to concentrate on driving? My German girl friend and I have good news for you. We just spent two weeks on a Greyhound Ameripass (now called Discovery Pass) to show her the Midwest I grew up in fifty years ago. St Paul (where my son Michael the video artist lives), Duluth, St. Ignace, Mackinaw Island, Tawas City (where we had our summer cottage), Bay City, (where I went to boarding school, but which is now a business center), Detroit (my home town), E. Lansing (where I first taught and finished graduate school), Muskegon, Traverse City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Lacrosse, Minneapolis, St. Paul.

We both survived! And we even learned how to avoid problems, which are inevitable in this cheap form of mass transportation. The pass cost roughly $300 each for 15 days, less for seniors and foreigners who either buy it in their home country or at the Port of New York Authority on Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. You can use credit cards.

Here are a few of our favorite tips:

1. Keep the Greyhound 800 number handy. You will need to use it often.

2. Have a pocketful of quarters--for lockers to liberate you for a stroll on a layover, of which there are many, some voluntary, others involuntary. For newspapers to zero in on local events (even a few dimes are useful for there are still some newspapers and telephones which will work for 35 cents.

3. Stock up on a few hotel chains address books. I belong to Days Inn's September Club, so we started with its members. They promise you up to 30% off for advance phone reservations, but never delivered in late May, a sign that their barking is less advantageous than their bite. We ended up in a lot of Holiday Inns because of their companion flies free promotion. By the way, USA Today publishes a lot of those chain promotions. Their weather page is practically indispensable for our kind of travel. We also used Radisson which is notoriously fiscally compassionate to seniors. As a Hilton Honors Club member, we booked the St. Paul Airport Hilton for our first night, in deference to my friend's long flight from Frankfurt. Serendipitously, it adjoins the Minnesota River Nature Preserve, which gave us a fine tour down to the riverside, finally terminated by squadrons of hungry mosquitoes.

4. Don't be shy in asking for favors. When I groused that I thought Honors Club members always got free breakfasts, the clerk gave us passes to the Executive Lounge on the top floor, where the view competed with the cuisine for our attention.

5. Be flexible. When Traverse City unleashed a rainstorm on us that would have intimidated Noah (but only after we had gnoshed fried walleye at the Bum Steer), we scotched our stay there and backtracked to Muskegon, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Benton Harbor to Chicago. There we really lucked out at the Printer's Row Book Fair, and had a glorious reunion with my favorite Windy Chicagoan, Studs Terkel, who recalled his visit to my home in Philly in 1975 for a "Working" autograph party as if it were yesterday. Then he left the Green Room to expatiate on his newest book, on Death! The crowd (including me) went nutsy over his extemp shticks.

6. Ponder skeds carefully. For example, there is only one service to St. Ignace from Duluth, begins at 6 p.m., and with an hour break in Escanaba (l-2 a.m.!), it got to St. Ignace at 5:30 a.m. Alas, the motels are strung along for miles north of the bus station, our Days Inn being almost two miles away, with no taxi drivers awake! Luckily, we sweet talked the bus driver into Greyhounding us right up to the motel office. For a $5 tip, we got to sack in after watching a mind bending sunrise over Lake Superior on our balcony.

7. Some local lines fill in the increasing blanks in Greyhound's network, for example, Indian Trails in Michigan and Jefferson Lines in Wisconsin. You have to know ahead of time if there is such a link, for example, in our case between St. Ignace and Tawas, and have a special ticket written for the adjoining line by the Greyhound office. Sometimes this can be a Catch 22. When we arrived in Traverse City from Muskegon, the Greyhound office had already closed and wouldn't be open when we were to go to Mackinac, if we hadn’t been flooded out. The bigger Greyhound stations can print you out a computer schedule of options for your next move, but you have to be there early to get that service. (The same is available by 800 numbers, but not as clear as the print outs.)

8. The biggest problem we faced was choosing a hotel near the bus station. In Chicago we lucked out at the Holiday Inn City Center, a short two blocks from the bus station, and a straight 10 minute shot to Michigan Avenue. Hotel chain books rarely give you the bus station's location (airport always, Amtrak often), so you've got to juggle between Greyhound's and the hotel chains' 800 number to do long range geography. The trouble is that the cheapest chains are on the Interstate peripheries. If you go into a town blind, you've got to scan the horizon as you near the bus station for options. We didn't stop in Grand Rapids, for example, because of hotel location uncertainty. At the next stop, Muskegon, the Holiday Inn was a two minute, very visible hike from the station. The Choice chain offers Greyhound Senior Club members ($5 membership) discounts, but they were never close enough to the bus stations we used.

9. DON'T BUY THEIR PHONE CARDS. I got exactly one local call in Detroit out of my $5 card. Four times out of five, it malfunctioned, and a Greyhound driver explained that each attempt, successful or not, cost 69 cents! By all means have a phone card, to zero in on locations when necessary.

10. Maintain your sense of humor. And avoid big cities on weekends if possible. The Jefferson Lines driver from Rochester, MN to St. Paul was a black militant who played black kitsch for the entire three hour trip. Full blast. When the lady in the front seat complained, he replied, "It's my bus, lady." If he had played Duke Ellington, O.K. But mediocre Motown, ugh. I tried to play the Cannonball Adderley CD a friendly rider from Muskegon to Chicago had given me, to no avail. There's no accounting for nut cases. But then the up side is that Chicagoan whose conversation about jazz history prompted him to gift me as he left the bus at 94th and Dan Ryan to go to his Hyde Park apartment.

Win some, lose some. But in the middle of a gas crisis, Greyhound's lines can be winsome too.