Wanderlust Wednesday- The Great American Bus Ride by Irma Kurtz

 

Irma Kurtz spent a little over three months going cross-country in a Greyhound Bus (well 65 busses, actually). She breaks the book up by buses/regions. Each bus ride comes with an anecdote about a person she met on the bus. This book had high points, but wasn’t a book that when I finished it I though Oooh! I want to explore! or even Oooh! I want to take a bus trip! The beginning of the book had some really insightful moments about travel in the beginning. It was just these little stories of moments that she thought was interesting, but not like any other travel stories I’ve read. There were a few quotes that I liked, though:

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“America in a road country. To be without wheels in America is to be lame.”

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“I had learned on my previous trip that luggage has a way of traveling on a different bus from its owner, and the only hindrance to impulsive bus-hopping is a suitcase in the hold.”

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“One lesson I have learned from traveling is to encounter a city exactly as you do an individual, open to its personality and its intent.”

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“Every journey imposes its rhythm after a while and becomes its own reason, with no purpose but itself. And every journey, soon after the excitement of departure, has deadly mornings, mornings of bad surprises and disconnections, sick mornings, morning when you know you’re not getting any younger and you wonder what possessed you to leap out of your comfortable bed one day and go where the telephone always rings for someone else.”

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“Young people, when you travel, well, you are bound to be seen by the world. Later in life you can travel and see the world without anyone paying much attention to you.”

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“Our world is big, our time is short: we who want to see a lot must deduce useful truths from every shred of evidence we come across, no matter how small, and even at the risk of sometimes committing an injustice.”

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