Photo credit: Ted & Dani Percival
As someone who has travelled on bus trips all across the UK I can confirm that the vast majority of them pass off with little or no excitement.
Sure, there’ll be a stop at a tired looking motorway service station, where one of the other passengers (usually from Eastern Europe) will have to run across the car park at the last minute to jump on the bus before it pulls off.
You might also get someone playing some annoying rave or rap music very loudly near you. While I am on this point – how loud do you need to listen to your mp3 in order for people a few rows away to be able to hear it? These people must have eardrums like blooming sieves after listening to Ice Shady or Vanilla Daddy or whoever it is that they turn up to such a high volume.
Listening to music while travelling is one of life’s great secret pleasures (along with reading in bed and watching home decoration programmes) and I certainly don’t want to share it with a dozen disgruntled bus passengers.
Sometimes the passengers give you a bit of entertainment as well, don’t they? I sometimes enjoy trying to work out where people are going to get off or what their life story is. It certainly helps pass a few idle minutes on the motorway.
Vapour on the Bus
Anyway, a genuinely exciting thing happened on a Megabus coach on the M6 recently. A passenger noted “vapour” coming out of another passenger’s bag. The police, the fire service, the army bomb squad and Bob the Builder were all called in to try and sort things out.
Of course, if you were near Lichfield in Staffordshire at the time then you already know this. A big chunk of motorway was closed off for a number of hours and rush hour chaos inevitably ensued. And what did they find? Well, the vapour had come from a health improvement aid for smokers. I reckon the unlucky traveller with the smoking problem slunk into his or her seat and put their earphones in once the bus started up again.