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Brooklyn didn't wanna let me go!
Dec. 29th, 2010 09:03 pmFA LA LA LA LA, people! I hope you all have been having a lovely holiday long-weekend! I spent Christmas Eve day and Christmas with my mom in Brooklyn -- saw the family, made nice with my sister, had a lovely dinner; no stress, no strife. I had planned on leaving on Sunday afternoon, taking the commuter rail from Grand Central to Hartford to meet up with ComicbookMan, who was going to drive down from Boston for the Legends of Superheros Christmas Party, then we'd go home from there.
IT WAS NOT TO BE!
See, there was this hella scary snowstorm that blew in from Santa's Workshop the day after Xmas, so I stayed put in Brooklyn and ComicbookMan stayed put in our apartment in the Boston area, where he'd spent Christmas, ostensibly for cat-sitting purposes, but mostly sleeping. As the Sunday storm began to subside, I went on line and purchased a bus ticket to Boston on Peter Pan for Tuesday noon. NYC gets back on its feet very quickly after a snowstorm, and this was only the sixth-worse snowstorm on record, after all! I lived in NYC for many, many years, and I could always get to classes or my job in Manhattan the day after a snowstorm. Surely the city would be mostly navigable again by Tuesday!
OH, HA! OMG, NOT SO MUCH!
My mother's house is located in South Brooklyn. Tuesday dawned, but there were no buses running in Brooklyn, despite the false info the MTA website posted. Even if there were buses, there were no trains operating in Brooklyn. There were also no car services for hire. What was the problem? PROBLEM: there was no snow removal of any kind from any of the streets, even the major ones; at all, at all, at all. ZERO.
Peter Pan's buses were running by 5am Tuesday, so they basically laughed at me when I called to ask if they'd honor my Tuesday ticket on Wednesday (they are honoring Sunday's and Monday's tickets all week.) Customer service at Peter Pan -- a bus company named after a sociopathic little bastard! -- didn't care that there was no way for me to get into Manhattan to get on their bus unless I'd started walking out of Brooklyn on snow shoes at about midnight the night before.
Fortunately, I checked online and found a ticket on Bolt Bus for $1.50, on the 11:30am Wednesday bus to Boston. Seriously, a buck-fifty. Since Bolt is owned by the same company that owns Peter Pan, it's as if they reissued my ticket for a minor change-of-date fee. Except Bolt buses are way nicer, newer buses than Peter Pan's buses, and Bolt takes a much shorter route out of Manhattan, so there's a lot less nausea-inducing stop-and-go. It was force-of-habit that I checked and purchased from Peter Pan first, but no longer.
So if you plan on busing from Boston or Philadelphia or Washington DC to/from NYC, check out Bolt before you try Greyhound or Peter Pan. Oddly, the same company owns and operates all three bus companies, but Greyhound's buses are even worse than Peter Pan's. The weirdest thing is that Greyhound's tickets are usually the most expensive of the three! TERRIBLE buses. HIGHEST prices. Buh? IS THIS SOME SORT OF STRANGE SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT?
I left my mom's house at 9am and got home at 6pm, and yet I consider myself lucky.
IT WAS NOT TO BE!
See, there was this hella scary snowstorm that blew in from Santa's Workshop the day after Xmas, so I stayed put in Brooklyn and ComicbookMan stayed put in our apartment in the Boston area, where he'd spent Christmas, ostensibly for cat-sitting purposes, but mostly sleeping. As the Sunday storm began to subside, I went on line and purchased a bus ticket to Boston on Peter Pan for Tuesday noon. NYC gets back on its feet very quickly after a snowstorm, and this was only the sixth-worse snowstorm on record, after all! I lived in NYC for many, many years, and I could always get to classes or my job in Manhattan the day after a snowstorm. Surely the city would be mostly navigable again by Tuesday!
OH, HA! OMG, NOT SO MUCH!
My mother's house is located in South Brooklyn. Tuesday dawned, but there were no buses running in Brooklyn, despite the false info the MTA website posted. Even if there were buses, there were no trains operating in Brooklyn. There were also no car services for hire. What was the problem? PROBLEM: there was no snow removal of any kind from any of the streets, even the major ones; at all, at all, at all. ZERO.
Peter Pan's buses were running by 5am Tuesday, so they basically laughed at me when I called to ask if they'd honor my Tuesday ticket on Wednesday (they are honoring Sunday's and Monday's tickets all week.) Customer service at Peter Pan -- a bus company named after a sociopathic little bastard! -- didn't care that there was no way for me to get into Manhattan to get on their bus unless I'd started walking out of Brooklyn on snow shoes at about midnight the night before.
Fortunately, I checked online and found a ticket on Bolt Bus for $1.50, on the 11:30am Wednesday bus to Boston. Seriously, a buck-fifty. Since Bolt is owned by the same company that owns Peter Pan, it's as if they reissued my ticket for a minor change-of-date fee. Except Bolt buses are way nicer, newer buses than Peter Pan's buses, and Bolt takes a much shorter route out of Manhattan, so there's a lot less nausea-inducing stop-and-go. It was force-of-habit that I checked and purchased from Peter Pan first, but no longer.
So if you plan on busing from Boston or Philadelphia or Washington DC to/from NYC, check out Bolt before you try Greyhound or Peter Pan. Oddly, the same company owns and operates all three bus companies, but Greyhound's buses are even worse than Peter Pan's. The weirdest thing is that Greyhound's tickets are usually the most expensive of the three! TERRIBLE buses. HIGHEST prices. Buh? IS THIS SOME SORT OF STRANGE SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT?
I left my mom's house at 9am and got home at 6pm, and yet I consider myself lucky.
