This post is a little overdue but better late than never right!? So the first ever major bus trip is now over, and I must say it was awesome. I’ll try my best to remember everything as I write this but I’m sure I will miss something.
We set off from Ottawa in the morning, and made it to the Thousand Islands Parkway near the bridge to the U.S. It was just Zara and I at this point. We stopped at a pullout along the highway and waited for the rest of the travelers. A while later the rest of Zara’s family pulled up and we loaded in about a million bags and dance stuff. We were now 6 in the bus: Me, Zara, her three sisters (Emma, Aidan, Justine) and her mom, Khor. Unfortunately, her dad couldn’t join us across the border so he got the job of driving them out from Toronto and picking them up again on the way home.
We did the drive to Boston over two days. The first day was good, we learned a lot about how to secure things in the bus. The first many corners I took came with the sounds of shifting and falling items… It was a nice drive as we started to enter in to the Adirondaks.
Paul is one of the worst back seat drivers 😛
Our destination for the night was an RV park just outside of Albany, NY. A few minutes before the New York – Massachusetts border.It was a nice, quiet little spot. We didn’t have the nicest of sites but for one night it was all we needed. During our first night we discovered a few issues with some of the sleeping arrangements, and we found out that when you turn the front table into a bed it squeaks… A LOT.
Day two. We set off in the morning and onto the Mass Pike.
Walmart stop! We had a little photoshoot with the bus before heading into a MASSIVE Walmart and getting hopelessly separated for over 30 minutes… After Walmart, we decided to stay in the parking lot and make lunch. Zara and her mom walked over to Home Depot to buy some screening for the windows (we wanted to leave the windows open past dusk) and the rest of us stayed back to make sandwiches. As we were sitting eating lunch, a woman poked her head into the font door and yelled “Y’all gOIn’ to the casInO?!”. Caught by suprise, all I could say was “this is and RV.” to which she responded “Oh where that at!?”. “Right here” I said… Clearly we we’re having some communication issues. Eventually we managed to convince her that we were not going to a casino and that she couldn’t get on. With that over with, we got back on the highway.
Our destination was Winter Island Park in Salem. This is a beautiful spot right on the ocean. What we didn’t know, however, was that, on the day we were arriving, the whole park had been rented out for a Greek festival of some kind. As we pulled up to the entrance, down a tiny, tiny road, all we saw was a sea of cars and people. every inch of the single-lane paths had cars parked along them. We found out where our spot was and started down the roads. We were making corners with one, maybe two inches of clearance on either side but we made it up to the field, and parked the beast.
The one good thing about the festival is that we didn’t have to make dinner that night… mmmm.
We hung out a t the beach and explored the park over the next two days. On day three, the dance competition was starting, and we had to get all of the dance cargo into Boston. We got to the hotel, and subsequently got kicked out for parking in the wrong spot… Here is the bus parked along the street outside the hotel while we figured out what to do.
We were shown to the loading docks and unloaded from there.
Zara;s mom, and the sisters checked in, and then Zara and I took the bus back to Winter Island. They were staying in the hotel for the dance competition, and we were stating in Salem, commuting into the city to see the shows. Boston has a great commuter rail service, but the station was a long way from the park and the hotel. We had been thinking about buying bikes for a long time and this seemed like a good opportunity (cheaper prices and lower taxes).
Here we are riding the train with our new bikes!
The dancers didn’t get much time away from the hotel, but Zara, her mom and I wanted to get the tourist experience of Boston. Here is us getting the best pizza ever in the north end (the name of the restaurant escapes me) EDIT: it was Regina, thanks Khor.
Visiting Harvard:
We also bought Settlers of Catan and played it for the first time in the hotel lobby. Awesome game.
We did a pretty serious time-lapse of the trip home. You can see us leave Salem, pick up everything at the hotel, and head down the Mass Pike. We stopped for lunch at Denny’s and zara’s mom forgot her purse, which we didn’t realize until we hit a toll booth an hour down the road… Thankfully, some other dancers left after us and stopped to pick it up for use. We stopped at a truck stop to wait for them to catch up so I let Emma and Aidan try driving the bus for a loop of the parking lot. After sorting all of that out, we stopped at a nother toll booth and were short cash. We did manage to scrounge up enough change but when I went to pull away the rain had gotten so hard I couldn’t see 5 feet in front of me. Turns out there was a tornado warning… there were branches flying across the road and everything outside was sideways. We felt safe in the confines of the bus but thankfully it only lasted a few minutes. If you look carefully you can see the storm creep up in the time-lapse and then hit when we stop (it all happens in the last 15 seconds of the video).
The girls and their studio came home with a huge number of trophies (as usual) and most of them ended up in the luggage bays of the bus, along with a couple giant cheques. Coming back into Canada the border guards gave us a hard time and searched the whole bus.. they we’re a bit confused by all of the trophies and a little in awe of the bus 😉
