$1 Bus = best $1 purchase outside of a winning lottery ticket

For all those doubters - it was an adventure/trip well-worth the $1 I paid.

Things people told me about my $1 bus ride:

1. There will be no bathroom.
2. There will be no A/C.
3. It's going to be a school bus.
4. You will die.
5. They are going to steal your luggage.
6. You'll have to pay $50 to get off the bus.
7. They are going to knock you out and steal your organs.
8. You are stupid.

But who wins? I do. Because there WAS a bathroom, and A/C, and it was coach bus, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY I am alive.

The bus stop is at this major intersection outside the Metro Center stop. There's the little megabus man logo on a sign. I wait there and the luggage policy on the website clearly states that you can have one piece of luggage to go under the bus and another to store in your overhead compartment.

This is the woman in front of me.

There are more bags behind those. She had like 6 bags and I was pretty sure she wasn't going to get on. Then this man in a red vest starts yelling for "MEGABUS TO NY."

He checks my confirmation/reservation number and then tells me to have a seat on the bus. I start pulling out my phone to take a picture of the bus and of the Megabus sign, and he stops, stares at me, and says again very, very slow, "Take a seat. On. The. Bus."

Of course I then scurry on and find a seat near the front where I can creepily watch everyone else board the bus.

A bunch of young ladies get on the bus, and then this classy young thing rolls up with an older classy thing. And I think it's totally cute until the mother starts talking to the driver. She asks him where the bus stops, and when he answers, she yells onto the bus after her daughter, "DID YOU HEAR THAT? WHERE ARE YOU GETTING DROPPED OFF?" Then asks if she can board the bus to say goodbye to her daughter. Climbs onto the bus, her sunglasses still on, and tries to make her way down the aisle. Meanwhile, her daughter is absolutely mortified and tries to pretend like she doesn't see/hear. Her mother immediately pivots and hobbles off the bus, announcing loudly to all the passerbys on the street and the driver, "She doesn't want to see me." She then proceeds to have another conversation with the driver who is trying to check more people in until he finally stops acknowledging her. After talking outloud to the street, she just wanders away, like a woman who has walked too far from the nursing home and doesn't remember where she lives.

I am sitting in my seat, taking a nap, when this woman across the aisle from me starts to talk loudly on the phone. The first thing I wake up to is, "What's up sugar?" I assume, because of the volume of her voice, that she is talking to the driver and trying to make friends.

No. She is of the breed where the smaller the phone is (or the more ethnic looking an individual is) the louder you talk. She proceeds to have this ridiculously loud conversation. But I also feel bad making fun of her because she might be suffering from a disease. The one where you can't control the volume of your voice.

On the bus, at one point, the bus driver realizes he is in the wrong lane on 95. AKA the left lane and he needs to be in the right lane. We are right outside the city at this point. He pulls a Little and veers across 4 lanes of traffic, just as 95 splits. There is a HUGE difference between doing that in a little Hyundai and doing that in a GIANT COACH BUS.

Also, at one of the stops, the driver was talking on the phone about how some guy hit him on his way to the airport and drove off and at the time apologized and said it was his fault and is now recanting. The driver then yells on the phone that he's getting a lawyer. Who hits a bus? If you hit a bus, maybe you shouldn't be driving because it's not like they're easy to not see.

It reminds me of a time in elementary school when our bus was making a turn and we told her she couldn't make it and she told us to shut up and of course, she didn't make it. She crushed the entire front left side of a Mercedes as the guy was dropping off his daughter. She said that thanks to the Mercedes being like an inch over the "kiss and ride" line (the line cars pull up to to drop off kids, not a line cars pull up to to pick up prostitutes), she was off scot-free. That afternoon, she hit a trash can on the side of the road because she was distracted by the older kids who had found her trashy romance novels and who were reading outloud the graphic scenes to the first graders.