I, royal sitter of the interstate bus tour, supreme consumer of fast food and Chinese buffets, inhabitor of traveller’s motels and occasional pitshops, do hereby record the following of my journeys.It’s the fourth day of my Midwest travels, and writing this post grants pleasant relief from the tedium of the rolling hills and grass that dot the landscape. There’s a lot of road to travel, and we’re currently spearing through two states to get from Mount Rushmore to Yellowstone National Park. It’s certainly been a tiring but mostly boring journey.
I’m not really complaining or whining about it, though; after a few days of riding, I’ve realized that the Midwest is a fairly large and boring place whether you go through it yourself or with someone else at the wheel. Landmarks and points of interest are far from one another, and if you’re going to come up here you might as well hit everything noteworthy along the way in one go so you wouldn’t have to do it again. A bus tour alleviates some of the joyless driving and allows for a lot of sleep when you’re only getting 4-5 hours every night (though our collective pities go out to the bus driver).
Being on an Asian bus tour, though, has its quirks: it’s a federal mandate to board every bus with a loudmouth, talkative and outright bitchy older lady (i.e., “auntie”) that will leech the very life out of you if she decides that you speak her language or even remotely understand it; every rest stop feels like a Chinese invasion of restrooms and liberal looting of anything free; anything that may be unexpected (e.g., a thunderstorm, wild animals crossing the street) will give rise to its own short thunderstorm of camera flashes and awed “waaaah”s.
Worse, my parents are somewhat disappointed because I don’t exhibit the same kind of stereotypical behavior and interest in what I consider to be, I guess, mundane.
So it continues, another three days of exciting non-stop bus-riding action. I’ll try to post a few more select pics as I sort through my dad’s digital albums and pics. For now, though, I’ll post these last few; they were taken as I was under a heavy barrage of rain and hail (you can see it starting by the droplets on the pond in the first one), risking my life to take what turns out to be overexposed quickies.
