26 Mar 04
Brian slipped behind the wheel of our home for a week and Grand Junction became a distant memory. Guan had travelled a million miles, the equivalent of to the moon and back, mostly via Newark and Jersey City, but latterly via Chicago, South Dakota and Colorado.
"I kept you a spot," Brian said sardonically: for 50 feet, half-naked bodies were intertwined on wall-to-wall mattresses. It looked like a snake pit. Green Tortoise calls it 'The Miracle' - 38 people finding space aboard the Guan. Only one gap remained. I fill the bus to overflowing, my sweaty feet nestling between two sleeping bare backs, my head pressed against one of the rattly windows. The brochure had promised no sleeping with heads against windows, Greyhound-style...
I wasn't able to sleep that night. The next morning, we pulled into a small town gas station. My neighbour stirred, opened an eye and screamed for no good reason. Darren was, until May, a student; now he was trying his hand as a sales manager. An American girl named Margot eagerly offered to swap places with Darren. Margot, it turned out, was eager about everything. I was too cramped to be flattered. I clambered off the bus, followed by another Brit. "Know the cricket score?" he asked gruffly. I didn't.
Sleeping on an Aeroflot jet is good training for a first night on the Green Tortoise. Everyone else had already been through the first night on their way out of New York, where they boarded five days earlier, and now slept serenely through petrol stops, beer stops and the inevitable pee stops (those caught short had to use a funnel that lived near where the doors would have been in Guan's previous incarnation).
Brian, who'd been driving through the night, joined the Land of Nod, leaving Jennifer the Bus Queen (a part-time student of video, and his co-pilot) to deliver her mainly European load to another jaw-dropping piece of American landscape. Spike, the stuffed low-maintenance bus pet, sat on the dashboard for company. There was no telling what animal he might have been before meeting the taxidermist.
