Day 0 of 3 – The Windy Apple

At this time it is unclear to me if taking the overnight Greyhound bus to New York City was a good idea. We just left the Ottawa bus station ten minutes ago and things are okay so far. When I bought the ticket four weeks ago, the dude said these buses are never more than half full. When we arrived thirty minutes early at the station there was a rather large number of people waiting at the Syracuse / New York gate.

Turns out that there’s a group of criminology students from Carleton University going down to watch a taping of an episode of Law and Order. Did you know it’s filmed in front of a live studio audience?

The GF and I manage to get seats next to each other so I’m a little more relaxed now. The only thing that’s missing is seatbelts. Seriously – why don’t intercity buses have them? Not how I want to go. Not at all.

We have a connection in Syracuse (go Orangemen) and I expect the whole journey to take about ten hours from my door to the bus terminal in New York.

21:33 departed my place (walking)
22:05 arrived at the bus station
22:30 departed the bus station
07:45 expected arrival downtown NYC

I sometimes (all the time) wonder what the advantages are to flying versus taking the bus. Here is how I see this journey:

• Figure ten hours travel time for the bus where flying would take about five hours from my door to downtown (forty minutes to the airport, ninety minutes to clear U.S. customs, eighty minutes flying time, and maybe another ninety minutes to land, get a metro card, and take the bus downtown). Advantage flying.
• Cost for two people to fly around nine hundred dollars CAD. The bus was a cool three sixty. Advantage busing.
• Dealing with airport-based U.S. customs and security. No contest – advantage busing.
• Seatbelts – advantage flying.
• Odds of actually surviving a crash – advantage busing.
• Odds of a crash actually happening – advantage flying.
• Ability to parallelize activities – I can blog or sleep on the bus where the flight is too short to get any meaningful amounts of either – advantage bussing.

This list is all fine and dandy but I’ll probably be in a better position on Monday to report on the whole experience.