Bus Chronicles

I've really been slacking on this blog thing. I know that at least one person has been particularly anxious to hear about my life as a bus driver, and I have been anxious to write about it too, but I just haven't had the time/energy. Then after I was already a few weeks into it I felt like I had so much to summarize that I felt overwhelmed and just haven't written about it.

Basically bus driving has been going well. Driving a bus is as fun as I had always imagined it would be. The first few days were the hardest because before that point I had always driven with a trainer, but now I was out on my own. If I made a mistake there was no one else to blame. I was constantly and nervously checking my schedule sheets making sure I was on time and in the right place. No matter how many times I checked the schedule and my watch I still had this uneasy feeling that somehow I was still doing something wrong.

As far as I know, however, I didn't really mess anything up. Actually, my first day was the roughest. After picking a bus out of the barn in the morning to take out on my route, I realized that the radio wasn't working and so I had to go get a new bus which caused be to be 15 minutes late on my very first loop of my very first route of my very first day. Luckily it wasn't really my fault but rather a simple mechanical mishap. Then on that same day, on my very last loop before clocking out, the bus I was driving broke down. I was able to get it started back up and get it back to the transportation center, and again, it wasn't my fault.

After that first day things went pretty smoothly. I work Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in the morning/day, and then on Wednesday I have a night shift that goes to 3:00 AM, so I get lots of drunks on that shift. I drive several different routes. I drive the "Intown" route that goes between Golden Peak and Lionshead for about half of each of my shifts, and then the other half is either West Vail, or the Golf Course/Lionsridge Loop/Ford Park. The only route that I never drive is East Vail. I'm guessing that East Vail must be the best one to drive because it seems like all of the more seasoned drivers who get first pick of their shifts drive East Vail while a lot of the drivers that I tend to see driving Intown and West Vail are the newer drivers like me who got the dregs shifts. I don't mind though. I like my shifts and I get a lot of diversity with my routes. There are some drivers who drive the same route all day every day, but I can't imagine how boring that would be. I would much prefer the mixture of my shifts.

Just physically driving the bus is pretty fun, and really that's the whole reason I wanted to be a bus driver. While it took a little bit of getting used to driving something that big, I'm already pretty used to it. I love using that big steering wheel to steer the thing around curves and stuff. I love all the sounds like the air brakes and the diesel engine and stuff. I even enjoy opening and closing the doors.

There's more to being a bus driver than simply being able to operate the thing. You have to know the routes and the stop names and be able to answer the myriad of dumb questions that people ask you about how to get here there or the other place. You have to pay close attention to the time to make sure you are on schedule. This is the hardest part, I think. Even almost a month in I still have to be careful not to get ahead of schedule. When I do get ahead of schedule I just have to stop and wait at a stop for a few minutes to get back on schedule, but I think that's probably just as annoying for all the people on the bus as it is for me. I wish they would just adjust the schedule so that I had to speed around everywhere really fast to stay on schedule, but as it is I have to poke along below the speed limit sometimes just to eat up some time. Now I realize that busses don't always drive slow just because the are big and cumbersome, but rather because they are just trying to stay on schedule!

I don't really have any good stories yet, but I do have lots of thoughts and impressions about bus driving that I hope to write about in the coming months, but for now I need to go to bed. It's almost 8:00 and I had to get up at 4:00 this morning, and I need to get up almost that early again tomorrow morning. Maybe on Wednesday I'll sleep in really late, 'til like 6 or something, haha.

The next Circa 1997 video is Macarena. Maybe this was more like 1996, I don't remember, but it was probably still kicking around in 1997 too. When this song was popular I didn't know that those two guys were speaking Spanish. I thought it was just some strange made up jibberish or something.