How many buses does it take?

So how many should it take? One, How many did it take: four! That’s right four buses. Needless to say it was an eventful trip. So how did it get started. It started normally at the airport in Reno where 13 of us where waiting with luggage and snowboards. Let’s see who where the lucky passagners about to emabark on this epic trip. 6 englishman who where on the way to be ski bums for the winter at Mammoth, Three people including myself who were going to be working for the Mountain. Three old ladies who where passing the time crocheting and they eventually ended up giving crochet lessons to the whole bus. And one gentleman who was on the his way back home from surgrey in Reno. So that was the crew that boarded the crest bus and left the airport at 11:45 with any incllation of what was in store for us.

The trouble started when we were heading out of Reno and started up wabasch(or something like that.) hill and the accelrator cable broke strand the bus halfway up the hill in the middle of the road. Needless to say it is very scary to have cars, semis with single, double and triple trailiers pass you at 65+ miles an hour. If wasn’t in the middle of the day you had to wonder how long it would be before somebody was going to hit the bus it was just a matter of time. Thankfully that didn’t happen. After spending several minutes determing the acccelator cable was broke, a nevada highway patrolman stopped and set up a buffer zone between us and the oncoming traffic and finnally after several phone call from the trooper and the bus company dispatcher a charter bus from a casino in Carson City Nevada. came and picked us up and took us to the casino and dropped us off to wait for another bus to take us further along to mammoth lakes and beyond.

If we had to wait any longer, I had a feeling that the snow boards would have been pulled out and a makeshift lift would have been put together somehow. Before that could happen the second bus of our trip arrived and picked us up. We left the first bus on the side of road for a tow truck to come. While the passanger rode in a charter buss to Carson city. Needless to say it was the best bus of the trip. It was a charter bus that the casino uses to make runs to the reno airport and it was very nice, it was too bad that we didn’t have this bus for the rest of the trip. But oh well, it got us to the casino where we waited for the third bus to come, (another bus from Crest). It could have been very dangerous if we had stayed there for much longer. But instead we took full advantage of the layover and got some lunch. A very neccsary thing that if we didn’t get anything to eat, it would have made the trip very ulgy. But in the end it was the best part of the trip.

So after about 45 minutes at the casino we were paged and finshed up lunch and met the third bus where were joined by a man who was returning from christmas shopping. Whoever he was giving the present to will be very happy. Because he will be finding a remote control hummer under the tree. The box is so big, I wondered if there would be room with all the luggage that we had. But alas we did.

So we took the third bus to the repair shop where waited for the first bus to come with the luggage and another bus of the same size to take us all the way to mammoth and bishop, ca After a good while both buses arrived and we transferred the luggage and the people to the fourth and last bus of the trip, where we proceeded to make it without any further problems.*

*Except for the heater not really working and several phone calls to the Mammoth housing office to make sure the would let us check into employee housing the rest of the trip was uneventful and we were only two hours late. Considering everything that happened that’s not bad at all.

Next time. “What the hell do Califoriniains mean when they say Down south?