Megabus, a love-hate relationship
Man, I love Megabus. If I think ahead enough, I can get a really, really cheap (like $1) ticket to New York City. Down there, I can do lots of stuff, like visit my brother, have fancy dinners, go to weird cupcake bars and shops, and other things you can do in New York City.
But I really do hate Megabus. Aside from the obvious complaints, little room for big people like me, buses never reach the destination at scheduled times, buses not maintained clean all the time, I have a few more specific things, more specifically stories, about why I hate these things so much.
On my last trip down to NYC, which was for the 2011 WFMU Record Fair, I took the Megabus down to NYC. My ticket, round trip, was $20 or something. So I can’t really complain. But, by golly, I can observe! And most of these complaints aren’t about Megabus per sé, but are more like things that happen on Megabus.
This trip, and just about every trip, the person who sits in front of me is always a woman wearing perfume that is just like a trip to the strip club. It never fails. And don’t think I’m getting down on this smell, it’s an ok smell. It works great in the strip club, not so great on a 3+ hour bus ride into a tunnel.
The girl sitting next to this woman for this trip was reading a book, and I swear, in the corner of my eye, I watched them turn the pages, and I didn’t see any paragraph indentations. It was like one big wall of text from page to page. The nosey part of me made sure I found out what the book was; it was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve never read it, and now never will because I’m intimidated that a book with no paragraph indentations exists.
Generally, the people who sit at the four top tables on the bottom deck of the bus are extremely annoying. On this trip, it was four middle-to-older aged women who were literally planning a tour of Italy, specifically Florence, on the bus. I mean, these women had maps, tour books, smartphones, and everything that you’d use to plan something all laid out on the table. And, as an added bonus, I got to hear them talk about their ideas among themselves and with whomever they kept calling. Yea I know, I had my Beats by Dre Tour earbuds in, and I was blasting episodes of Breaking Bad on Netflix, but even when I switched to gangsta rap, I still heard these women.
The last thing I’m going to complain about is the WiFi on the bus. As far as I can tell the WiFi on the Megabus, when it is working, is completely useless. Since I’m not 3′ 2″ and 40 lbs, I unfortunately won’t fit in a seat with a laptop, so I wouldn’t bring a computer, but when I go through the motions of connecting to the WiFi on my smartphone by authenticating in the browser, it only lets me use the data in the browser. So things like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Google Music, or other app services that would use the data connection, can’t connect to their WiFi. Luckily, I have a 4G-LTE phone, and 4G-LTE currently accommodates enough bandwidth to use these things, but it’s still annoying.
So, anyway, yea I love to travel for cheap, but I guess hate everything about it.
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