Guus Bosman

Friday I left the office very early, and took a bus to New York at 1.00 o'clock. I had bought a sandwich in the morning from my favorite place near work, Tivoli. When I wanted to eat it in the bus I saw that the cheese had gone bad! A big disappointment.

I had a great seat in the bus, right behind the bus driver. I enjoy that spot because it gives you a great view of the road and there's no seat in front of you so there's more space for a laptop. There weren't a lot of people travelling and I had two seats for myself. I spent the afternoon working. It was a good opportunity to clean up my mailbox: I had about 2000 messages that needed to be filed, deleted or dealt with. The only thing missing in the bus is an internet connection -- perhaps in a year or two, three. I reviewed some documents and spent a lot of time on the phone, it was quite a productive ride.

Unfortunately Friday afternoon is probably the worst time of the week to travel to New York. We left D.C. at 1.30, but didn't arrive in New York until 7.00 o'clock, an hour later than the schedule had said. It took more than an hour just to get from the turnpike to the Lincoln tunnel... Apparently it was the first time for our busdriver to travel at this hour, he was not very pleased with the traffic either and got rather cranky at his colleague who kept on calling him to see where he was.

I listened to the same CD about four times, and I had a few MP3s on my computer that I listened to as long as I could take. I really want to get a noise-cancelling headphone one of these days.

We made a stop in Delaware at a gas station and we took a ten minute break.

When we arrived at Times Square there were a lot of people waiting for the bus -- much more than would fit in a single bus. I was glad that I was at my destination. The driver told his colleague that he was not planning to return to D.C. right away, but first needed to get some rest and a dinner. Can't blame him after a 6 hour drive, but I felt sorry for all the people that were waiting.

The departure point in Washington D.C. for Eastern Travel is in Chinatown.