Things Are Going South Fast: Part 1

30 April 2015 @ 9:00PM

There was a German girl sitting across from me in the Prince George Greyhound bus station. I hadn’t asked her name; she hadn’t asked mine. It didn’t really matter. Her west bound bus was leaving in a half an hour, while I had another two hours before the south bound bus departed. It had been a while since I’d spoken with a backpacker, but it was nice to start the trip off that way. I was leaving Prince George for the first time in 115 days, and having this person to talk to about travel things helped me to get back into the traveller mind-set. Hell, just having someone to talk to was a nice distraction from the battle of emotions churning through my body. I wanted to leave so badly it hurt, but I also didn’t want to leave my new friends or this new place I now called home.

When the girl got on her bus, I turned on my phone and plugged my headphones in. Earlier that day, I had downloaded Cora Carmack’s “Losing It” and right about then, I couldn’t think of a better distraction than the awkward Sexyness that is the hallmark of Carmack’s craft. Awkward people need love too; I should know. Anyway, I was so engrossed that I almost didn’t notice that people had begun to queue up for the south bound bus to Kamloops.

After getting my luggage stowed in the cargo bay beneath the seats, I found a widow seat and snuggled up next to my pillow. It was already half past 11, and I so I told myself that I would just listen to one more chapter. I’ve told myself this lie so often that one would think I’d know better. Needless to say that when we stopped at a Tim Horton’s around half 2, I was still awake.

I considered getting a coffee, but I’m sorry Canadian friends, Timmy’s sucks for coffee. So I bought a sandwich instead and then proceeded to listen to the audio book until its completion. I think I finally nodded off during the epilogue.

My eyes opened to the soft, pale-yellow, glow of the eastern hills gradually blending into the lightest baby blue. Scattered cumulus clouds looked pinkish-purple in the glassy clear water of the numerous ponds and streams strewn about the rugged tan-green hills. This landscape could only have been the illegitimate love-child of Turkish Anatolia and the Scottish Highlands, and when seeing it awash in the predawn light, it was hard to imagine anything more beautiful.

The scene flickered before me, on and off, several times before a consistent shutter sound jarred me into a more stable state of consciousness. It took me a bit to recognise the skeuomorphic noise as a camera phone. It was a good idea so I followed suit.

After about half an hour, the sun rose above the hills and we had arrived in Kamloops. A twinge of sadness ran through me as I stumbled out of the bus and into the bus station. Memories of a black January night, bitter cold, and missing her flooded through my mind, as I took a seat and watched a line of bleary-eyed passengers shuffle into the station with all the grace of a horde of zombies seeking the all illusive grey matter, or maybe just coffee. 
The Kamloops bus station is nothing to write home about, which is probably a poor turn of phrase considering I’m literally doing that. However, my time here wasn’t supposed to be long, and so soon enough, I was back in queue to board the next bus to Vancouver.

I ended up chatting with two older gentlemen about one of those grab the prize with the claw and joystick games. A few days before, I had been listening to NPR’s “How to do Everything” and they explained the trick behind these types of games. So I shared it with my new companions, as I will here: Not surprisingly, the game is rigged to insure you lose the overwhelming majority of the time. So the secret is that not only does the claw have to be positioned exactly right to grab a prize, but also that the actual strength of the claw’s grip changes each time. This works out to where only around 1 in 20 times the claw is actually strong enough to pick up the prize, assuming the claw itself is aligned perfectly. The moral of the story is that those games are not worth yours or anyone’s time.

Our line slowly marched towards the bus, and we began to wonder if there would be enough space for all of us. There wasn’t. As it would turn out, there were two busses to Vancouver in quick succession and some of the passengers from the later bus were on my bus. The first bus was scheduled to leave at 7:00; the second bus (an express bus) was due to leave at 8:30. It took so long to get all the passengers sorted onto their correct busses, that our bus didn’t leave Kamloops until 8:00. No one, and especially not the bus driver, was happy.