How to survive a Greyhound bus trip?

Surviving a cross - country Greyhound bus trip

Greyhound is a bus company that connects most of the major cities in the United States of America, and in most cases, it is a lot cheaper than flying. It may take longer than a day to reach the destination that would only take a few hours to fly to. In this blog post, I decided to collect some tips to make your future Greyhound trip easier.

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This is how Greyhound buses look like. Impossible to miss.

Make sure you arrive to the bus station early enough

The Greyhoud website advises arriving at the bus station at least thirty minutes before the scheduled bus departure, but I suggest you get earlier than that to the bus station, or not if you are okay sitting in the worst spot. A lot of people arrive early simply because they want to choose the best seats. The seats are not assigned, so you can pick the seat you want, well, assuming you get there early enough.

Also, sometimes Greyhound buses depart a few minutes earlier than the official departure time, so this is another reason to be at the bus station on time. Make sure you print your ticket(s), they will not let you get on the bus if you just show a ticket on your mobile phone.

This is how you identify a Greyhound bus station. Sometimes, it is an actual station, and sometimes the bus will just stop at a gas station or a parking lot - just look for a sign like this so you will know where to wait. I took this picture during my Greyhound trip to New Orleans.

Bring an extra sweater…or three

In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned that in the United States of America air conditioning is everywhere, and it is mostly turned down to pretty uncomfortable levels. This unfortunate rule applies to Greyhound buses as well, and I am not joking when I say that my teeth were chattering in the middle of the night, and I literally put all the clothes on that I had with me and I was still cold.

I was not the only one, the woman sitting in front of me went to talk to the driver to see if he could make the bus a bit warmer, and his response was that the air conditioning on Greyhound buses only has one setting - the arctic temperature one. He also said he would rather drive a cold bus than one that is too hot, so my advice is to bring some extra clothes. You will need them, even if you are travelling to a warm destination.

Free Wi - Fi and power sockets.

All Greyhound buses offer free Wi - Fi and power sockets to charge your electronics. Sounds too good to be true? It partly is. When using Wi-Fi on Greyhound buses, forget about YouTube and other video streaming services, they disable video streaming because if you streamed videos, the Wi-Fi would be super slow for other users.

Well, I only found out about that on the bus and I did not put any music on my smartphone before the trip, because I was planning to listen to music on YouTube. Luckily I also brought a book with me, which allowed me to forget about my misery for a couple of hours.

Power sockets are situated at every seat, but they are old and sometimes the bus movements will make your charger slide out. Speaking from personal experience - I plugged in my phone because my battery was almost dead, then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I saw that my charger had fallen to the floor, so friendly advice - bring some tape with you and tape the charger into the power socket.

Bring some snacks

Greyhound buses make frequent stops, but it is still helpful to have a snack or two with you. Why? There are two reasons: - Greyhound bus stations are typically situated in the middle of nowhere, so you cannot really walk to the nearest grocery store during the stop and buy food; - Second reason is that Greyhound stations have vending machines, and sometimes a food court, but the food there is overpriced and not very good.

Bring a pillow, earplugs and an eye mask

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Greyhound buses are comfortable, but if you sit on them for more than four hours the ride can become a real pain. The seats do recline quite far back, so you might be able to get some good sleep.

Even short bus rides can be uncomfortable, but travelling across the country on the bus can make your neck hurt really badly without a pillow. You can bring one of those small regular pillows, or, even better, a neck pillow if you have one. Eye mask and earplugs are also extremely useful.

Well, if you do not have earplugs, you can also use regular earphones to block some of the sounds off. You are not allowed to talk on the phone (with the speaker on) or listen to loud music, but the Greyhound buses are extremely loud and noisy. An eye mask was a life saver for me because, despite the fact that the driver will dim the lights during the overnight part of the journey, the passengers can still use the reading lights, and they are extremely bright.

Tip: Take an overnight at Greyhound to save money that you would otherwise spend on accommodation, but do not expect to actually be able to stay on the bus all the time. When I travelled to New Orleans this past summer, I took a Greyhound bus from Cincinnati, and the journey time was, believe it or not, twenty-four hours. Not including the time spent at bus stops. So why did I travel by bus? Simply because my trip was for the Fourth of July, and the flights to New Orleans during those dates would cost me almost eight hundred dollars. I paid a small fraction of the price for the Greyhound bus trip.

During the overnight part of the ride, I was actually pretty shocked when the driver told us to get off the bus for one hour because they had to put gas in it and clean it.

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This is how a Greyhound bus station usually looks like on the outside. Again, impossible to miss with these big signs.

A few words to conclude...

Greyhound buses are definitely not the most comfortable means of transport across the United States of America, but they are cheap and fairly reliable. If your destination is more important than the journey, then you might easily survive long-distance Greyhound bus trip.

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