I've been riding buses since I was a little kid. To me, buses have always signaled adventure, excitement, being on the move, seeing the country. You know, that ever present travel bug thing. It's been with me a long time.

As a little kid, my Dad and I would often catch the evening Greyhound bus at the Port Authority Terminal in New York City for the ten-hour ride to Buffalo, where his mother lived. I'd try and stay awake as long as I could so I wouldn't miss anything, but I probably never made it past 8 o'clock, falling fast asleep to to the steady whine of the bus motor grinding along. But Dad would always wake for the 1am stop at the Horn and Hardart somewhere along the New York State Thruway, where we'd both have a donut. What a huge adventure!

Later on, as a young teen, my Mom would allow me to make the nine-hour trip from Bangor to UMass in Amherst to see my brother (silly Mom!!). The fact that I had to change buses in Boston was always a big deal. I was a real traveler now! More adventure, with a little taste of wild 70s college life thrown in. This was big stuff!

But not all bus trips have been good ones. Always interesting, but not always fun. Often times very sad. And sometimes downright dangerous.

Like the time I got mugged trying to get into the Phoenix Greyhound station, just barely getting through the door with me and my backpack intact.

Ditto the Atlanta Trailways station another time.

Or boarding a midnight bus in Flagstaff, Arizona and minutes later finding myself smack in the middle of a brawl between a busload of very drunk migrant workers and native Americans. The driver actually pulled over in the middle of the desert and kicked half the people off the bus.

My favorite is the time my bus was pulling off the highway at 2am somewhere in North Carolina when, from the roadside darkness, somebody decided to shoot a double-barrel shotgun at the bus. Rather than continue to exit, the bus driver smartly floored the thing and never stopped until the next exit miles down the road. We all got off the bus at the station and were, as you might expect, stunned to see the two round patches of pock marks as well as the shattered, but intact, windows. Miraculously no one was hurt. Pretty damn shaken up though.

A lot of this stuff was running through my head last week on a rather interesting bus trip via Greyhound from Anaheim to Palm Springs CA, where my buddy Tim was to pick me up.

I took a cab from my hotel to the bus station in Anaheim, purchased my ticket and proceeded to a bench outside to wait. A man already occupied one end of the bench. He was slumped over, asleep, and reeked of alcohol.

But as I sat down, his head popped up, and he turned to me and asked, "Where you going?"

"Palm Springs," I said.

"Oh, that's a nice place," he said. "Spent some time there."

"Really?"

"Yep, two years in an alcohol rehab joint. Very nice. I'd like to go back there sometime."

I didn't ask whether to Palm Springs or to rehab.

Later, sitting in the San Bernadino bus station waiting for my connection, just a few feet from the Target Terror game, which of course, uses guns...

A man, dressed in a crisp white T-shirt, blue jeans and black workboots, approaches the game, throws in some quarters and begins to shoot. Another man, also clad in a crisp white T-shirt, blue jeans and black workboots, comes up and says, "Jesus, man, move back a little. You never shoot from that close in real life."

Uh, okay.

Bored with the shoot-em-up blood-and-guts game, the men saunter off. At that, the man next to me leans over and says, "You did notice their clothes, right?"

Well, yes, but...

"Just released from prison."

I see.

My connecting bus makes a roadside stop in Banning. A man boards and plops down in the seat ahead of me.

And proceeds to talk to, then pet, a cardboard box inside a plastic bag. Then leans the other way, presses his nose firm against the window, and begins to make airplane noises, and continues to do so for the remainder of the ride. Except for the brief moment when he leaned over the seat and announced to me that he was the "Boy Prodigy" of Palm Springs.

There's a very real, very sad part of life out there that is only witnessed by getting right down into it. And, on this short bus trip, I just got another big, eye-opening lesson in it.