Road Trip Blog #2 (Wide Awake)

The beginning of this job seemed to creep up on me really fast. I was ending two basketball seasons and one was going to continue going on after I left. I had issued finding the best way to travel from the Chicago area to the Maryland area where our training was to be held. I knew if I fly it was going to be expensive and I'd have to pack less. I couldn't find a train station that had the right times so I decided to use the Greyhound. The actual riding was okay but the experience with the company over the phone and at the local station was horrific. If you book your trip in advance you can't change it or get reimbursed. It was partly my fault. I didn't look at the trip too closely but who seriously has an 11 hour layover followed by another 8 hour layover? C'mon! I just tried to fix it where I could get a long layover in a city where I knew someone I could crash on their couch. Nope wouldn't allow it. Thanks for that customer service assholes! I ended up missing my early bus ride and had to reschedule it for about 6 hours later. The lady in Chicago was very nice and reschedule it without charging me. If only the rest of the company could have been like her! When she did it my longest layover was only an hour. Hmm... idiots. The trip itself was nothing very eventful. I left Chicago on a Friday at 5 pm and I ended up in Aberdeen, Maryland at 11:30 am on Saturday. Originally I had gotten up at 5:30 am on Friday for an 8 am bus so needless to say I was extremely tired. The majority of the bus ride I had someone sitting next to me and I couldn't find a way to get comfortable enough to sleep for more than 20 minutes. The first thing I wanted to do after getting picked up was shower and take a nap. That didn't happen. We had to drive an hour back to where I just was in Baltimore to pick up another guy for this job. We then went on to do a meeting about what to expect and then dinner. The are eleven of us coaches/teachers on this journey and after dinner we checked into our rooms and then went out to a bar. Luckily I got a shower in between but I was so tired and in a zombie mode that I wasn't very social. I talked to my roommate most of the time at the bar about stuff. We went to watch some college games and I left at halftime of the second one. I went to bed at 11 PM. If I did the math right I was awake for about 42 hours. I will say that is my new personal best from 33 hours when I crashed into a ditch during a snow storm on a trip from Normal, IL to Orlando, FL.