Take me 'round again
Marisa and I went upstate this weekend to see family plus Rob (I think this essentially counts as just family). We wanted to give Lando a break after the Berkshires trip a few weeks ago and any number of upcoming summer jaunts up to and including a driving-distance honeymoon, so for our spring trip to Saratoga we decided to take the bus.
A (made-up) word about bus travel:
Sucksville.
Actual words about bus travel:
Actually, I'm not to cool for the bus. I used to defend it pretty regularly. I took the bus all over when I was in college, and I often found it surprisingly efficient, considering all of the potential variables and generally pretty lax organization. But post-college it was less often worth it, and it's pretty galling that bus travel only recently became a consistently less expensive option, when Greyhound, etc., were forced to take into account upstart companies that run cheaper trips. It happened once before, when the Chinatown Bus caused Greyhound fares along the NYC/Boston line to drop, sometimes even below Chinatown Bus levels, yet traveling to, say, Albany, would still cost about the same as a train ticket. You should at least get some kind of rebate for any method of travel that takes you directly to the Albany bus station. Or maybe it should be like Staten Island bridge tolls: free to get there, pay to leave.
Anyway, Bolt Bus and Megabus expanded their reach beyond even the NYC/Boston/Philly/DC zones, which eventually meant we got a Megabus route to Albany, which eventually meant Greyhound admitting that a three-hour bus ride to Albany is not actually worth $50 each way. Also, Greyhound has started adding free wireless to at least some of their routes, although it wasn't heavily advertised; I only realized it when I turned on my laptop halfway back to NYC so Marisa and I could watch some Eastbound and Down. I wish we had attempted that on the way up, rather than watching the second half of a skipping DVD of the movie Black Dog (although: I have to say, this movie didn't look too bad, as far as trucker movies starring Patrick Swayze and Meat Loaf go).
AND YET: riding the bus still feels gross. It even feels gross on the younger, hipper Megabus, and it certainly continues to feel gross even on a nicer and cheaper version of Greyhound. There's a smell. It's not even a rotten or particularly gross smell. It's just a bus smell, a mixture of recycled air, exhaust, and, I assume, bus-seat lining. It makes me queasy and sometimes a little carsick, which is weird, because I actually enjoy traveling by car.
Despite the bus, though, it was a good upstate weekend: a cookout at my mom's, a birthday party for one of Rob's Saratoga buddies, ice cream with my sister, my mom's coffee cake, wedding bands at Silverado, driving around listening to Sleigh Bells, and contributing another $30 to MacGruber's pitiful domestic total because I had to see it with Rob (I think this makes it the Dirty Work of 2010!).
And, of course, a trip to the drive-in:
Actually, "the" drive-in would probably be the Malta Drive-In or the Glen Twin Drive-In. Marisa, Rob, Sabrina, my brother and I went further out to the Ozoner Drive-In, out Route 29, because that was the one playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Iron Man 2, which Rob and Sabrina had not seen (nor had my brother, though I found out afterward that he hadn't seen the first one, either, but he seemed to follow it okay regardless). I'm relieved that I saw Persia at the drive-in, because if I hadn't, I would've seen it at a real theater, probably paying over $12 to do so, and I feel like that would've been a bummer. Even watching it at the drive-in, I started losing interest by the final thirty or forty minutes or so, and not just because they indulge in some semi-infuriating narrative trickery. At eighty minutes, I probably could've given this one a pass, but it really runs itself ragged at two hours, and I like Jake Gyllenhaal and even Gemma Arterton (Strawberry Fields!), and obviously I'm happy to see Alfred Molina and Slumming Ben Kingsley (is there any other kind anymore?). I also like that it seems to include a lot of actual stunts, not just CGI action figures (as far as I could tell; the drive-in screen does not encourage much scrutiny); some of the action-y stuff is fun in a live-action Aladdin sort of way. But someone online, I forget who, characterized it as sort of like if Pirates of the Caribbean focused exclusively on Orlando Bloom without any Johnny Depp, and that's about right, although this movie isn't even as funny as the non-Depp parts of Pirates, and Persia's world isn't as interesting, either. As much as I've enjoyed stuff like Pirates and the National Treasure series, movies like Prince of Persia make me long for the days of Jerry Bruckheimer producing disreputable dude movies like Con Air and Gone in 60 Seconds rather than searching for the next big Disney ride. Obviously he's not eager to eke out $100 million on all-star Nic Cage action vehicles when you can make a billion dollars on Pirates, but making all-ages adventure fun isn't as easy as it looks, and Prince of Persia doesn't have much sex or violence to fall back on. Iron Man 2 is still pretty awesome, though.
Now I am back in the downstate.
A (made-up) word about bus travel:
Sucksville.
Actual words about bus travel:
Actually, I'm not to cool for the bus. I used to defend it pretty regularly. I took the bus all over when I was in college, and I often found it surprisingly efficient, considering all of the potential variables and generally pretty lax organization. But post-college it was less often worth it, and it's pretty galling that bus travel only recently became a consistently less expensive option, when Greyhound, etc., were forced to take into account upstart companies that run cheaper trips. It happened once before, when the Chinatown Bus caused Greyhound fares along the NYC/Boston line to drop, sometimes even below Chinatown Bus levels, yet traveling to, say, Albany, would still cost about the same as a train ticket. You should at least get some kind of rebate for any method of travel that takes you directly to the Albany bus station. Or maybe it should be like Staten Island bridge tolls: free to get there, pay to leave.
Anyway, Bolt Bus and Megabus expanded their reach beyond even the NYC/Boston/Philly/DC zones, which eventually meant we got a Megabus route to Albany, which eventually meant Greyhound admitting that a three-hour bus ride to Albany is not actually worth $50 each way. Also, Greyhound has started adding free wireless to at least some of their routes, although it wasn't heavily advertised; I only realized it when I turned on my laptop halfway back to NYC so Marisa and I could watch some Eastbound and Down. I wish we had attempted that on the way up, rather than watching the second half of a skipping DVD of the movie Black Dog (although: I have to say, this movie didn't look too bad, as far as trucker movies starring Patrick Swayze and Meat Loaf go).
AND YET: riding the bus still feels gross. It even feels gross on the younger, hipper Megabus, and it certainly continues to feel gross even on a nicer and cheaper version of Greyhound. There's a smell. It's not even a rotten or particularly gross smell. It's just a bus smell, a mixture of recycled air, exhaust, and, I assume, bus-seat lining. It makes me queasy and sometimes a little carsick, which is weird, because I actually enjoy traveling by car.
Despite the bus, though, it was a good upstate weekend: a cookout at my mom's, a birthday party for one of Rob's Saratoga buddies, ice cream with my sister, my mom's coffee cake, wedding bands at Silverado, driving around listening to Sleigh Bells, and contributing another $30 to MacGruber's pitiful domestic total because I had to see it with Rob (I think this makes it the Dirty Work of 2010!).
And, of course, a trip to the drive-in:
Actually, "the" drive-in would probably be the Malta Drive-In or the Glen Twin Drive-In. Marisa, Rob, Sabrina, my brother and I went further out to the Ozoner Drive-In, out Route 29, because that was the one playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time with Iron Man 2, which Rob and Sabrina had not seen (nor had my brother, though I found out afterward that he hadn't seen the first one, either, but he seemed to follow it okay regardless). I'm relieved that I saw Persia at the drive-in, because if I hadn't, I would've seen it at a real theater, probably paying over $12 to do so, and I feel like that would've been a bummer. Even watching it at the drive-in, I started losing interest by the final thirty or forty minutes or so, and not just because they indulge in some semi-infuriating narrative trickery. At eighty minutes, I probably could've given this one a pass, but it really runs itself ragged at two hours, and I like Jake Gyllenhaal and even Gemma Arterton (Strawberry Fields!), and obviously I'm happy to see Alfred Molina and Slumming Ben Kingsley (is there any other kind anymore?). I also like that it seems to include a lot of actual stunts, not just CGI action figures (as far as I could tell; the drive-in screen does not encourage much scrutiny); some of the action-y stuff is fun in a live-action Aladdin sort of way. But someone online, I forget who, characterized it as sort of like if Pirates of the Caribbean focused exclusively on Orlando Bloom without any Johnny Depp, and that's about right, although this movie isn't even as funny as the non-Depp parts of Pirates, and Persia's world isn't as interesting, either. As much as I've enjoyed stuff like Pirates and the National Treasure series, movies like Prince of Persia make me long for the days of Jerry Bruckheimer producing disreputable dude movies like Con Air and Gone in 60 Seconds rather than searching for the next big Disney ride. Obviously he's not eager to eke out $100 million on all-star Nic Cage action vehicles when you can make a billion dollars on Pirates, but making all-ages adventure fun isn't as easy as it looks, and Prince of Persia doesn't have much sex or violence to fall back on. Iron Man 2 is still pretty awesome, though.
Now I am back in the downstate.