Girl, Meet World

Never Trust a £20 Bus Fare

Standing there with a suitcase handle in one hand and my carry-on luggage in the other, I realise that I am now all-too startlingly aware of the fact that I don’t have the first clue about travelling.

I’m not completely clueless, I guess. I have travelled outside of Scotland’s borders before. In summers past, I’ve been to Italy and Spain with the school’s brass band and I’ve spent more weeks in caravans in various cities down south than I even care to think about. I’ve been on day trips to the capital, and weekends in Glasgow. So, perhaps not entirely without hope.

Then again, though, none of those experiences involved moving away from my home and onto a whole new land mass for a period of six long, tedious months.

Has panic already settled in? Absolutely. I had spent the weeks leading up to this very moment surrounded by screeds upon screeds of paper with various to-do lists scrawled on them, obsessing over every last tiny detail. Passport: check. Acceptance letters from my home university and my exchange university: double-check. Proof of financial aid á la bank of SAAS: check(book). Plane tickets: check. Suitcases packed and ready to do: check, although re-packing them several times before leaving the house probably wasn’t my smartest moment. Everything I need to survive on my own for six months: tentative check, although something will have managed to slip through the cracks. Commons sense: a currently debatable topic as to whether I actually had any to begin with.

It is truly amazing how you can be in a bus station on multiple occasions in the one year, but still find it completely alien at a moment like this. While I’m busy fussing over the fact that I’ve probably forgotten to pack every pair of pyjama bottoms I have ever owned, I am being ushered in the direction of a bus that’s taking me on a journey that I’m not even sure I want to embark on. The doubt’s been here for days now — I have phases where the concept of my new adventure gets the better of me and I consider the fact that I may be doing the wrong thing altogether — but as I’m having cases taken from my grasp and people are waving their goodbyes, I am almost positively convinced that this decision is the worst one I have ever made in my entire lifetime.

Luggage is being thrown into the underbelly of the bus now, and everything is going by way too fast. My dad has one of my cases in his arms — my mum couldn’t bear to say goodbye, so he’s my only companion for the next few moments — and the bus driver is beginning to take them and I’m not ready, not at all. Fuck the stupid pyjama bottoms, fuck the fact that Euros remind me of Monopoly money. Fuck everything. I’m a huge motherfucking wimp and I can’t even look at my dad without feeling like I’m going to burst into tears in front of an entire coach full of people.

I’m not quite sure when it happened, but we’re boarding now and I’m looking around as I climb the small set of stairs, noticing all of the bus route numbers as I do. X76 — my way home on a Saturday night in Glasgow after drinking my liver into oblivion. 4 — the service that time forgot, and the bus you only board if you’ve missed every other bus back in that direction. 900 — the student-friendly budget route to get yourself to Edinburgh. My life currently is reflected in these buses, and I can’t help but feel tears prickle my eyes as I realise that I won’t see any of this for another six months.

I’m a big girl now, though — a mature adult about to embark on a journey throughout the world, creating my own new and unique path as I go. No time for crying, no time for acting like a baby and no time to regret anything. I tuck in my lower lip, feel my feet hit the ground as I push off of the last stair and wait for my partner in crime to join me on what is possibly the most idiotic decision of my entire lifetime.

Rachael is crying in earnest, however. She’s hugging Gavin and he doesn’t look like he wants to let her go. He does eventually, but they’re both torn up. You can tell. I’ve never seen Rachael cry like this, not in the three years I’ve known her. I find myself silently thanking every god that I don’t believe in that I’m currently single. No soppy goodbyes — we don’t cry in my family, and my father is no different — no attachments and nothing to stop me from settling into a chair beside a now-sniffling Rachael. I almost smirk despite the circumstances as I slide my hand-luggage case into the small area of floor space that my seat has been allocated.

Relationship: 0, Victoria: 1.
I’d like to pretend that I’m absolutely not the kind of person who puts the same song on repeat for hours on end, I really would. I’d be a better person if I just told people that I listened to one song and then moved on, but I’d also be a liar. I am a filthy, disgusting repeater and I am not ashamed of that fact. I listen to a song, get hooked and then replay it so much that I end up feeling physically sick after hearing the opening three chords.

Tonight it’s Dead on the Floor by Alkaline Trio. How terrific. The song that I’m going to remember starting this trip with is also a song that suggests death. Not a great help when one of your biggest fears is being killed in a horrific traffic smash. Matt Skiba and co., you have a lot to answer for. Lying here dead on the floor indeed. If it happens, I’m suing every single one of your sorry asses.

I can’t tell if Rachael’s asleep or just doesn’t want to talk, but she’s been facing the window for hours now. We haven’t said one word to one another since she asked to borrow my phone charger just after we’d passed Lancaster University. Sure, we had exchanged silent murder-glares when the two boys behind us had started ranting loudly about the ‘bloody Scottish’ — it had taken all of my self-restraint not to lean over the back of the chair and slap the two privately-educated fuckwits into next Sunday — but we hadn’t actually spoken in over an hour. This is a difficult situation for me. I am a talker, a natterer, a gossiper, a whatever-you-wanna-call-me. I have a basic need for conversation all day every day, practically twenty-four hours a day. You can check my school reports if you don’t believe me: Victoria is a lovely pupil, but talks way too much and is a distraction for anybody she sits beside.

Story of my fucking life, man.

In all honesty, though, the decision to take the bus to Sheffield was perhaps one of the worst decisions I had made in my lifetime. I could have chosen to wait a day, pay a little bit more and fly from Glasgow International to Amsterdam Schipol, but instead of making our lives a little easier, we had decided that the best course of action was to do the entire trip on the cheap. After a £20 bus fare, we were going to crash with Andrea, our third and final intrepid European explorer, and then travel to Manchester to actually get our arses onto a plane that’d take us to Central Europe.

So, instead of being in relative comfort in my own bed and having a further twelve hours to actually pack, I’m now sitting on a sweaty, smelly bus with my leg jammed between my case and the seat in front of me, wondering if you can get gangrene from not moving your foot in four hours. Rachael’s leaving me to my own thoughts entirely — not a good idea — and my back is numb. Worst of all, I’m trying to listen to the same song I’ve been listening to for nearly an hour now and all I can hear is the boys behind me talking in their irritatingly English accents about how they thought the Scottish independence referendum was a heap of absolute shite.

I’m telling you, if I manage to get off of this bus without stabbing somebody square in the forehead then it’ll be a minor miracle.
Sheffield Meadowhall is a welcoming sight.

I’ve never been down in this area before — my travels of the UK so far have always been limited to the Newcastle and York directions — but to be honest, I’d have been happy to have been deposited into the middle of a war-zone than have spent even a second longer on that god-forsaken bus. Note to future self: Megabus fares are ridiculously cheap for a multitude of reasons, the primary one being that the chairs have been created for the sole purpose of torturing passengers into painful submission.

Reason number two had everything to do with their restrictive luggage policy, the terms of which I was about to find out.

I’m halfway under the bus’s luggage compartment in search of my own luggage when the whole fracas kicks off. At first, I’m blissfully unaware of the storm that is kicking off on the platform. I’m just too busy trying to not get covered in dirt while using my comically short arms to attempt to pull my case from the other side of the bus. The next minute, Rachael’s tugging on my jeans so hard that I’m at risk of exposing my bare arse to the entirety of the bus station crowd at 1 in the morning. I throw my second suitcase onto the pavement and crawl out from underneath the bus, shooting Rachael a death glare on the way. She’s well rested; she slept the whole journey here. I’m tired and irritable, and I am absolutely not in the mood to mooney everybody who happened to be looking.

The poor bloke that started the whole issue doesn’t even have what would be classed as two cases. He has a case and one of those huge holdall things, the ones that you see wankers on the television using to go camping with. Between me and Rachael, we’ve got almost three times as much luggage as he has, but our current driver doesn’t know of this. By this point, I’ve started fishing the third case — Rachael’s first — out of the luggage compartment. I love drama, but not as much as I love sleeping and right now, I’ve got a serious lack of the latter fogging my brain.

The conversation isn't exactly the clearest — I’m not good with Yorkshire accents — but I can make out small snippets, like ‘only one case in the hold per passenger’ and ‘those are the terms and conditions, son’ and it’s at that second that I realise why Rachael is literally pulling my leg. We’ve been on the bus with two cases each, plus hand luggage, plus rucksacks. For me alone, that’s two matching suitcases that I’ve managed to smuggle onto the underside of the bus. We’re both obviously way over the one-case limit. Yes, we’re getting off and making room but we’re also breaking a rule that this drivers seems to take very seriously and in all honesty, it looks like he’s in the mood to rip someone a new arsehole.

I pull the final case from the luggage hold with speed, nearly knocking Rachael over in the process. She’s already started moving all of our cases further down the platform in order to hide them from the driver, who is now viciously arguing policy with his new least favourite commuter. She’s a smart one, that girl — she’s managed to hide one of each case around the corner with our rucksacks and to the unsuspecting passer-by, it looks like we’ve only brought one case each, plus our hand luggage cases. Acceptable luggage levels, at least by the eye of the devil reincarnate who’s apparently been driving our bus since we crossed the English border.

We’re safe, for now. We’ve managed to push all of the cases around the corner and out of sight and as we’re trying to get a hold of Andrea to come and save us from certain death, the driver and the unfortunate passenger seem to have come to an agreement. Another London-bound gent has disembarked and he’s putting the case in the hold for the young gentleman, who seems to look as if he could do with a couple of very strong whiskies. All is calm, all is bright. A silent night indeed.

Despite this, I’m still looking over my shoulder even after we’ve driven away for our very last late-night British-style McDonalds.