Well here we are finally settled into our hotel room at 9pm in Greensburg PA. Since this is the first bus tour we have taken I really didn’t know what to expect. The entire day was spent on the road. That is with stops every two and a half hours. The most noticeable first thing was probably if you did not have white hair you were the minority of this bus load and if you were a man you were most definitely in the minority. About two-thirds were women. When we were loading up this morning there were a lot of guys helping their wives get the luggage in the bus  and then the got back into their cars and went home! First conclusion is I guess bus touring is primarily a chick thing but there were enough other men that I didn’t feel uncomfortable.

We go underway about 7:30am and when we hit the interstate I was settling down with my macbook to do some database work. But our trip director had other ideas. She wanted everyone to play some games. Since I had a different agenda I tried to ignore what was going on. I told my wife she didn’t have to sign what was being said. I went about my business but pretty soon a bunch of stuff (food, books, household items) were being passed all around me. My wife decided to get back at me for not playing the game so I ended up with a toilet brush as my prize after the two-hour game was over!

Our first morning stop was at a McDonald’s and was primarily a pit stop but as you can imagine with 35 senior women and one toilet it was a long one. The second stop was for lunch at Cracker Barrel. I am not much of a fan of that place but since that was the scheduled stop that is where we ate. A couple more stops during the day we ended up in our hotel room about thirteen hours after we started.

Not having to do any driving was nice but the bus was not as smooth as I had imagined. Since the bus was a 2004 it did not have any conveniences such as cup holders, USB connections or pull down trays.  I could only hope that my laptop batteries would last and they did.

So far I’m not sure if the convenience of not driving is better than being told when we are going to stop and where we will eat. This trip could be more regimentalized that I am comfortable with.  But I should not be too hasty to judge it just yet. After all the real trip starts tomorrow when we spend the afternoon at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. The real action starts on Saturday with a tour of the White House at 8:00am (got to get up awfully early for that one) and the a full day of tours after that.

More on that later….