I was only home from New York for 3 days before turning around and heading out of town again. This time the destination was Palo Alto on Wednesday for a press conference at Facebook Headquarters. Then to San Francisco for the rest of the week, as Kin and I both had events to attend in the city on Thursday. On Friday, we went to the Mission to meet with Jon Voss from LookBackMaps -- by far the coolest project I've seen in a long while.

I hadn't really made firm plans for my turn to Eugene. And although Isaiah seemed fine at first with my absence, he sent me a message about midnight last night with a plaintive "I don't have any clean clothes for school on Monday."

And so I'm en route north again, taking what is, I realized, my very first Greyhound trip.

That's funny, I think, as I have travelled so frequently. And I've ridden the GO Bus (I think it was the GO Bus) from Toronto out to the Georgian Bay. I've ridden the bus from Guildford, England to Edinburgh, Scotland. But I've never, until today, ridden Greyhound.

The buses are nice. They offer far more leg room than airplanes do. And hell, they have WiFi, which means I can actually sit here and work -- something I don't ever manage to do when Kin and I bomb up and down I5.

But despite sprucing up the transportation, the experience so far has been, well, an adventure to say the least. The Sacramento Bus Station was replete with junkies and tweekers. The "first-come, first-served" small print for seating means that if you aren't standing in line you may not actually get onto the bus for which you purchased a ticket. (That would be me. I guess the airlines don't hold the monopoly on shady booking practices?) And if that isn't fun enough right there, you get to listen a lovely temperance speech from the driver for 15 minutes about the rules -- and the immorality -- of drinking and smoking on the bus.

Even though I think there's a lot to be said for having this affordable mode of transportation, the Greyhound employees certainly make it clear that you are a second-class traveler.

But hey, at least I'm able to use my portable electronic devices freely, eh?