Getting on the bus – Barcelona to Lisbon

When I travel I hope to gather experiences. Sampling local cuisine, seeing new places, absorbing the flavor of a previously unknown culture, is what I’m all about. This trip has certainly provided those opportunities – and more. The nearly full moon over the Mediterranean, the Park Guell, white anchovies and jamon washed down with sangria, it’s all been wonderful and appreciated.

All of those good things have made the new experience of missing my flight a bit easier to swallow. I don’t really know how it happened. I can only say it was a combination of a leisurely lunch and a couple of missteps with transit that led to us arriving at our gate only to be turned away as too late to board. Plan B, as in bus, became our best option.

I don’t often ride the bus at home, preferring the train for trips to NYC and opting to drive or fly to other destinations, but the bus was our only play to get from Barcelona to Lisbon. At about the time our flight was scheduled to land in Lisbon we got on the first of the three buses required to get us across Spain and into Portugal.

Bus travel is weird. I don’t know why the vibe is so different from flying. It isn’t as if planes are all that much more luxurious these days than a decent coach bus. The bus has individual entertainment monitors, wifi and reclining seats just like a commercial plane, yet somehow it seems to magnify the sounds and scents of its passengers in a way that an airplane fails to do, generally at a fraction of the cost. Bonus?

The smells on the bus were sobering – food and farts and foreign scents. I took my shoes off both as a means to get comfortable and self defense as I added my own aroma to the potpourri that filled the air. You’re welcome, bus riders. Our overnight travels allowed for a bit of sleep and when I awoke, we were nearing Madrid. My alarm at the state of my feet upon our arrival, swollen perhaps from the surprisingly good Chinese food we had consumed prior to our 7 hour ride, was completely trumped by the sight of my fellow passenger brushing her hair in the bus station bathroom. See, she had removed her hair attachment completely, revealing a much more staid coif than the Charo style hair she had been rocking when I last saw her in the seat behind me.

It’s been a weird morning. Time to find the next bus and continue our journey – Lisbon or bust.