Platform7

May 14, 2017:
I was walking around like a zombie, trying hard to understand what was happening. The time was just past 0200hrs. It took me some time to realise that I had to find the gate for my next bus. The Greyhound counter near the arrivals gate was not manned. I tried searching around if there is a board nearby. There was a board at Gate 64 that "Express" departures to Washington DC would depart from there. I wanted to confirm, and I took the escalator to the upper floor in the hope of finding a gate display. I did find a display board there, and it updated that my bus #1051 to Richmond, VA, via Baltimore and Washington would depart from Gate 74. Armed with this information, I returned to the lower floor, and headed towards Gate 74.



Interestingly, two people had already formed the gate, a good one and an half hour before departure! After a while, we too joined the queue - there weren't any seats to rest anyway, and since were already standing, it made more sense to …

While our (I and my colleague) plan to visit New York city was still being developed, another spark gets in. Why not go to Washington DC too? We had just one free weekend. I went through details of sightseeing spots in DC and we zero'd in on some spots to see. Based on this, we decided to make a very quick trip to Washington DC, spending a full day there. The final decision was to take a bus, traveling overnight, to Washington DC, spend the entire day in Washington DC, and take a bus back in the evening, to travel overnight back to Rochester. We first booked the outbound - since we couldn't really depend on our cards to book online, we headed to the Trailways bus station in Rochester to book our ticket. Transaction at the booking counter was really easy. The ticket had no less than 6 foils! One foil/coupon each for Rochester to Syracuse, Syracuse to New York and New York to Washington DC. Then one coupon to detail the itinerary, and one coupon to advertise the bus tracker and…

Given our time restrictions, we had to take the bus to return from New York. I had posted about the decision making process in my earlier post. Soon after we decided to take the bus, I headed out to the websites of the two major bus operators - Greyhound and Megabus. Megabus had two buses - one running over the day and another running overnight - both had terrible timings, and wouldn't fit into our requirements in any way. So it was down to Greyhound - they had buses through the day - no less than 8 departures! The overnight buses were ruled out due to their arrival timings at Rochester. We picked up a bus that left after noon, which I later found was operated by Greyhound's partner, New York Trailways. I also found that this was a special service, operating only on weekends. I checked out the website of New York Trailways as well, and finally booked the ticket through the NY Trailways website (since the Greyhound website was very slow to respond, and seemed to charge a highe…

Ain't you guys going to New York? Its just 300 miles from here!

This was the starting point. The spark had already lit the fire, and more people came in and fueled the fire. With the fire raging, I got searching for ways to go to New York City. NYC was only 330 miles away from Rochester, where I was put up. The prospects of seeing the Statue of Liberty, nothing else, stood out. It took some time for me and my colleague to get to the decision of traveling to New York.

Next problem was to find a suitable day to travel - most of our weekends were already scheduled. We finally found one weekend that we could take out. The next issue was booking our tickets. Flights were ruled out since they were really expensive for the short trip we had to do. "What about taking the train?", was the next question. "Trains here are very slow. There aren't many trains either," came an answer. Okay. But there should be a way. I head to the Amtrak website looking for trains to Ne…