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You never fail to meet people with, umm, interesting, personalities and just plain characters when traveling on a Greyhound Bus. I may be slightly masochistic for doing so, but I took a bus from Pennsylvania to Seattle, Washington last fall. I had wanted to see the country more than I could from a plane, so I opted for three days of torturous travel salted with beautiful scenery and entertainment in the form of crazy conversations and antics of other passengers.

The trip began as a sleepy and dull ride. I have a difficult time sleeping when traveling, so I tried to nap when I could. There is not much in the way of scenery between the east coast and Denver, so I filled the time dozing, listening to music and reading. But soon that stuff grew old.

I struck up a conversation with an older guy named Moses, from the St. Louis area; actually from the countryside near there. He had worked in a factory, invested wisely and retired early. He was a self declared aging hippie who talked about government conspiracies of every scope. He also had some unique agricultural ideas that involved composting manure to collect methane gas. He had carried the idea to fruition, hauling tons of manure to his property, only to find a major flaw the livestock owners neglected to mention-that they fed their animals specially processed foods to discourage methane production!

Having not slept much at all, time began to blur at this point. We passed through Denver and the rest of Colorado on a beautiful, warm clear day. Later that afternoon, in either Montana or Wyoming, we stopped to wait for passengers on a different bus. When we stepped off the bus, we found the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees from a couple hours before and the clouds rolled ominously across the sky, bringing an early snowstorm to the area.

Shortly afterward, I met up with Ben, a thirty something year old guy from all over the place. Currently, he was traveling to Seattle to start over completely. He had worked as a boat driver on some Michigan island, slowly growing weary of it until finding the straw that broke the camel's back in a psychotic woman admirer. He spoke about this woman as if he had dated her for years, but later informed me he had been dating her for a week when she had grown angry with him for not going out with her one evening-so angry in fact, she found a one night stand, thinking it would make him pay attention to her! While he said there were other things he was tired of, the fact

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