Tales of Great Debate Adventure: Satan's Bus Trip

I have a vague recollection of this occurring as fiction in Nostrum Series 1…

Friday our bus left right after school. Or at least, that was when we were scheduled to leave. Given the Swiss precision with which Sailor buses usually appear to sweep us away, I was rather surprised to see nothing yellow that was bigger than the proverbial breadbox. For a while I’d walk up to the buses that did pull up in front of building, pressing my nose against the driver’s window, only to be told that this particular vehicle was heading to the basketball game or the 43-man Squamish competition. A series of phone calls (“A bus? To Philadelphia? What are you, nuts?”) ultimately yielded a big yellow taxi at about 3:30, an hour late.

We should have seen this as an omen.

Fortunately I had written down clear and detailed driving instructions, plus printed up a few Google maps. We were shortly on our way. I watched a WDW video and an episode of Diggnation on my trusty Touch, and before long our first Speecho-American announced that he had to go to the bathroom.

This was when it all when inextricably wrong.

Normally I do not allow Speecho-Americans to go to the bathroom. Debaters understand, of course, that this is a bus trip, not a pleasure cruise, but S-As don’t get out of the house much, so what can you do? We stopped somewhere for a minute, and the thing was, when we got back to count the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, we were somehow on a different spur. Cars and buses and trucks and low flying aircraft were zipping by us to our right, while we were now traveling at a rate of about a mile a year, give or take a few yards. It took us an hour to progress the next two miles through a toll both. EZ Pass my foot!

The good news is that we had no real destination time. I texted CP telling him I wouldn’t be there at the crack of 7:00 for registration, but I fully expected that we’d have a nice dinner.

Then the bus got a flat tire. The first reaction of my chaperone parent on hearing the sound of the blowout was to ask if anyone had gotten shot, the normal speech parent thing, I guess. Debaters, used to long trips and the sound of gunfire, are able to recognize a dead tire when they hear one.

We were now 2 ½ hours from home, and 1 ½ hours from the unharvard. They told us they’d send down another bus from home. I texted CP and told him I’d see him sometime during the Palin Administration.

The good news (of course, at this point, even the election of Sarah Palin would have been good news) was that we were able to hobble to the Molly Pitcher rest stop. Viva la Pitcher! So we hung out for the next few hours, first having dinner (there’s a Dick Clark Grill, for God’s sake, where the food was edible enough and they showed Sonny and Cher videos, which were not edible), then playing cards and downloading the tournament data and entering and reentering the room changes (they had wireless for $3.95 an hour). Unfortunately, they didn’t have a bar, which would have come in handy at this point. What kind of highway rest stop doesn’t have a bar? Jeesh!

The rest of the trip was uneventful except for the fact that we never saw the road I had so meticulously noted on my directions. It had to be there somewhere, but, well, exactly where still eludes me. The wolves were howling in the night, and we hit about the third big sign saying “This Way to Philadelphia, Sort Of” when I finally gave in and said, let’s try this one. Finally, a stroke of luck, as this was Route 76, which takes you practically into the tab room. I mean, all we needed was to get lost at this point, and I would have fed myself to those wolves, and deservedly so.

We finally hobbled into our hotel a little after midnight, the point at which they had cancelled our rooms. The hotel was actually a couple of floors high up in the middle of a hospital; I think we were between the terminally depressed above us and the chronically itchy below us, but I wouldn’t vouch for that. In any case, we had set a team record for the Sailor longest trip ever, somewhere between 9 and 10 hours, depending on how you interpret our start time. The only saving grace was the knowledge that Bronx Science holds the overall record for bus trip length in the region, which is 11 hours to get from Bronx Science to Dewitt Clinton (which is situated directly behind Bronx Science) via the George Washington Bridge, the Appalachian Trail and the Erie Canal. But we did come close.

Oy.