The blog challenge prompt is “Write about a memorable walk/bus/train/flight journey”.

I have done those.

When I think of walking, I remember walking in the pasture with my brother or friends and getting grabbed around the ankles by devil’s claws.

I think of walking around town with my friends. Sometimes it was to help one of our friends on her paper route. Sometimes it was tagging along with my brother and his friend, laughing as he tossed a glass bottle behind us and then ran pretending someone was throwing things at us.

I don’t have much experience with trains. The “train” I have ridden the most often is the little train at the Topeka Zoo, both when I was a kid and when I was a parent. Our daughter got her first sip of Pepsi on that train, because Kansas summers are HOT.

Then we also rode a 3 hour train when we vacationed at Branson, and that was very relaxing.

I have taken one trip by air that wasn’t a transport to a hospital (3/10 do not recommend when you are 6 months pregnant and desperately need to tinkle the entire flight). We traveled from KC to Portland, Oregon when the boys were very young (7, 5, 3) to visit my grandad. It was memorable, because our 3 year old was the only one who got searched (person and luggage) because he reached out and touched the metal detector as he walked through, and because his portable nebulizer looked like a mysterious black box in his suitcase.

I also got to tag along when one of our sons got to pilot a plane through a school program, Wright Flight.

When it comes to bus travel, I got to travel by bus to visit my parents back in the college days when none of us had reliable transportation and wanted to gather for holiday meals. The best beef & noodles was served at a little cafe in Solomon, KS when we would stop there on the route; that cafe is now a truck repair shop.

But my first bus ride is probably my most memorable. It was sometime between 1979-1981, and we were down in Kansas City for one of Jon’s many surgeries. I’m going to guess it was in 1981, because that was one of the bigger surgeries and the one that ended up with complications. The surgeons removed a piece of Jon’s rib and used it to reconstruct his hard palate. Unfortunately, they messed something up and the chest tube was trying to pull out muscle along with fluid, so his stay ended up being longer than anticipated. Dad was a farmer, and you can only be gone from a farm for so long. Mom had to have the car in Kansas City so she could travel back and forth from the Ronald McDonald House and hospital, and also so she could bring Jon home when he was released. This left me and Dad with the Greyhound bus if we wanted to get home.

This isn’t it, but it has the same vibe:

There were rows of seats in the station as we waited for the bus to arrive, and it was all quite sterile and industrial as far as decor. At some point, Dad needed to use the restroom, and he came back fuming mad–it was a pay toilet. Dad had run into this in France when he was stationed there in the army in the 60s, but recently America had tried to make public restrooms pay toilets. You had to insert a dime or nickel or quarter (depending on how greedy the business was) into a slot on the door before it would unlock and let you do your business. The only thing that cheered Dad up about the situation was that he found a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin on the floor, so he made a net gain of 90 cents in the transaction.

Eventually the bus arrived, and Dad and I climbed aboard and found our seats. It was warm and stuffy, but the seats were fairly comfortable. There was a bathroom in the back of the bus, and just for the experience I did make my way back there once to see what it was like to use the facilities in a moving vehicle–spoiler alert, it was just like using the toilet in my grandparents’ RV when we went on a trip with them. Someone opted to not use the bathroom, however, so Dad and I spent the trip with our feet up off the floor watching as a small river of urine and bits of trash rolled up and down as the bus trekked through the hills of eastern KS. When we finally got to our hometown, Grandpa McCall was waiting for us at the former hotel/now record store and arcade and drove us on out to the farm.

Side note–if you have been paying attention, yes, I have way more than the standard 2 sets of grandparents. I only had one set of paternal grandparents, but on my mom’s side there were bucket loads of ’em. My granny married 4 times, and each of her former husbands remarried. It was easy enough for us to keep them straight, because we called them different titles than just Grandpa or Grandma. Granny originally married Grandad (or Grandad Oscar, as my kids know him), and Grandad remarried Lila. Husband #2 was Grandpa McCall, and he remarried Edna. Husband 3 was Max, and I have no idea who he remarried cuz we never had any further contact with him. Grandpa Jim was lucky number 4, and the longest marriage by decades until Granny died. Granny’s mom also married multiple times, and one of my aunts married 4 times, so we got lots of practice when it came to mapping out family trees.

So yep, those are some memorable journeys–I’ll be back in a few days with the next post!