Go round and round

Living in Spain has changed me. I’m now a bus person.

Let me explain. When I was a kid, my family didn’t do buses. This was the 1960s and 70s, and like any proper family (we thought), we had two cars and used them both daily. My dad drove to work, and my mom drove herself and us three kids where we wanted to go. We didn’t even ride the bus to school, although the stop was less than a block from our house. In retrospect, I realize that it meant Mom got out of the house a couple of times a day, which must have been a welcome change. I just assumed that she took pity on us and didn’t want to make us wait out at the bus stop in 90 degree heat and 100% humidity. But whatever the reason, we weren’t on buses very often. In high school, I rode buses to the occasional speech tournament, but that was about it.

Going off to college at the University of Texas at Austin changed my relationship with buses. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the UT buses if I wanted to go downtown or to a shopping mall. Sometimes I took the Greyhound to Beaumont to see my family. And during Winter Break my first year, Mom and I went off on adventure on a bus. We caught a Greyhound to New Orleans and saw the King Tut exhibition at an art museum there. The viewing was spectacular, but my most treasured memory from that trip is my mother drinking a hurricane at Pat O’Brien’s Bar on noisy Bourbon street. She was happy – partly from being somewhere fun, I hope, and partly from the rum. The memory makes me smile.

In law school I moved off campus and acquired a car, thus fulfilling my destiny as a Texan by having my first big adult purchase be a vehicle. While working in Houston as a clerk for a federal judge, I rode a shuttle to and from the courthouse to my apartment complex, but otherwise I made my contribution to traffic snarls and climate change by driving everywhere.

After Mark and I got married and moved to Austin, the only buses in our lives were the ones in the song we sang about a million times to our babies (“The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round,” with appropriate hand motions, of course) and our kids’ school bus (because I was clearly neither as home bound or as kind as my mother, although, in my defense, Austin does have better weather than Beaumont). Admittedly, we did ride tour buses when traveling; in London, I went absolutely gaga over riding on the top level of double decker buses. The stiff upper lip types probably thought (correctly) that I was a complete dork, but so what? But the most memorable bus was a local one that we rode from Mexico City to Teotihuacan. By and large our fellow passengers were rural Mexicans, loaded down with large sacks of whatever they’d presumably bought or tried to sell in the city. One woman had a live chicken tucked cozily under her shawl; remarkably, it was one of the quietest passengers that day. But these jaunts were the exception, and mostly we drove and flew to move around.

That all changed when we moved to Spain. We don’t keep a car here. Our apartment sits in the center of the city, and we walk to the beach, grocery store, pharmacy, hardware store, restaurants, bars, and the like. If we need to venture far afield – say to Carrefour, our equivalent of Target – there’s a convenient city bus that residents like us can ride for free. To get to the nearest rail station or airport, we take an inexpensive bus from our local station. And I’ve become quite a fan.

We’ve discovered that riding a bus is something of an art. The bus schedule is a suggestion, not a mandate, due to traffic, construction, and how often the driver needs to go to the bathroom. All of this is perfectly reasonable. But it does mean you need to be early to your stop (in Spanish, your “parada,” which always makes me think there should be a band), in case the bus is early. You also should have something interesting to do on the bus, in case the ride turns out to be longer than anticipated, but not so interesting that you get engrossed and miss your stop. I have almost missed my stop while buried in a book, so this is definitely a note to self as well as to anyone who’s thinking about riding buses. And I always carry my trusty fan, in case the air conditioning isn’t quite as robust as one might hope.

But riding a bus often turns out to be fun. You can meet interesting people while waiting; yesterday, for example, I met a woman who’s originally from Poland, has lived and worked in San Francisco, Miami, and Vancouver, and is now a Canadian citizen living here in Torrevieja. She spoke perfect English, but it’s fun to visit with Spanish speakers, too. That’s a great opportunity to practice my miserable Spanish, and, unlike in the USA, locals don’t fuss at people who are trying to speak their language and sometimes mangle it a bit in the process. And then there’s the added benefit of getting to see where you’re going; when you’re driving, (I hope) you’re focused on the road and not the scenery.

So we’ve become more invested in public transportation, which is both good for us and for the environment. Maybe you should give it a try as well, if that’s not in your personal routine. You may be surprised at how much you enjoy the experience. And when you travel, try out the local bus system instead of always opting for a taxi or Uber. And of course don’t hesitate to take the fun bus tours when you visit new places. I’ll leave you with a picture of the bus from our Magical Mystery Tour bus in Liverpool, where we spent a happy day paying homage to the Beatles. Singing “Yellow Submarine” with a bunch of strangers while driving the streets where the Fab Four grew up is one of my fondest memories of this year. Now go make some of your own!