Taking the scenic route

"Excuse me," I say to the mullet-sporting man behind the London Greyhound counter, "what time does the 3:30pm bus arrive in Toronto?" Without missing a beat, the man tells me that it arrives at 7:30pm. I don't remember taking four hours to get here Thursday night, so I ask him when the 5:30pm bus will arrive in Toronto to make sure he hadn't misspoken. "Same time as the 3:30pm one--7:30pm," he replies confidently. Now, my math isn't great but even I know that two buses leaving from the same city two hours apart from eachother shouldn't arrive at the same time, so I politely ask the man if there is something about these London-Toronto routes that I didn't know about. It turns out the 3:30pm bus stops "everywhere from here to Toronto".

It's only 3:15pm so I have some time to make a decision on which of the two buses to take. I don't fancy riding in a Greyhound bus for longer than I have to, so I comtemplate killing two hours in London before boarding the later bus. But a cursory survey of the neighbourhood reveals that, like almost all Greyhound stations in North America, this one is situated in a part of town not suited to tourists wanting to kill time. In fact, the only thing one can kill in this part of town is other people. I decide to nix that idea and get in line for the 3:30pm bus. For the next four hours, I will get a tour of rural ontario with my iPod as my sole companion.

Up till now, what little of rural Ontario I've seen was limited to the thin tracts of farmland visible from the 401. So, in a way I'm very glad that I was forced to take the roundabout slow bus today. Hey, not many people can say they went from London to Paris (Ontario) aboard a Greyhound bus, right?


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