The bus... The people...
It was pretty easy to spot the Green Tortoise pickup spot behind the San Francisco bus terminal: I saw scruffy folks pulling backpacks out of a taxi; I followed them. At the time, I was a scruffy backpacker myself, weighed down with new sleeping bag and tent.
A confusion of people: there was more than one bus' worth here. From the chatter, some facts arose: More than one Green Tortoise bus would be here soon. Each bus would hold folks from more than one tour. (My own "Northern Pioneer" tour was the first half of a "National Parks Loop" tour and thus share a bus with the Loopers.)
Soon a bus arrived. It was taking folks from the Northern Pioneer and National Parks Loops buses. Oh, hey, that was me. There were two drivers: Jimmy and Charlie. I set about helping Charlie to cram giant backpacks into the bus' cargo compartments. Charlie showed me the special "leverage" necessary to get bags to fit: shoving really hard with a well-placed foot. Not knowing what to expect on this trip, I'd packed too many clothes. But maybe that was a good thing when it came to padding against "leverage."
A flurry of waivers, a clomping onto the bus, nervous smiles amongst folks still strangers, and we rolled east, heading out to less-populated lands.
After a couple of hours, we stopped to perform "the miracle". I'd known that would sleep on the bus. I hadn't realized that we'd sleep on it as it was moving... and that the bus' unusual internal layout made this possible. The internal layout was interesting—just as shipboard life is interesting with its space-saving arrangements, the Green Tortoise bus interior was tweaked for efficiency.
Most buses have forward-facing seats. But this Green Tortoise bus had long, deep sideways-facing benches. When we were ready to sleep, there were flat pieces of wood that "bridged" the aisle, fitting together with the benches to make one big platform. Thus, you could turn a section of the bus into a bed. The back half of the bus was normally left like this, even during daylight hours, populated by sprawling backpackers.
The "miracle" involved laying down these pieces of wood and rearranging the padding to transform the bus' interior into a sleeping space. High shelves were re-purposed as bunks. Dinette tables turned into yet more sleeping space.
It's not easy to lay out 36 sleepers on a bus. We had to sleep laid out in alternating order, one person's feet beside the next person's head. You were always aware of the people around you. If you squirmed, you jostled the people beside you. You hear about sleeping arrangements like this in mining boomtowns when too-many miners took shelter in too-few boardinghouses. Now we were living that life in a moving vehicle.
Folks who know me are thinking "Larry, you don't like being touched by anybody who's known you for less than 10 years. How could you stand this?" I don't know why, but I could stand it. The first night sleeping on the bus I didn't sleep well; maybe because I slept next to a guy tended to fling elbows. But after that first rough night, I got used to it.
It didn't always go smoothly. One night, we didn't sleep super-compressed in the back of the bus. We were rather compressed, but our head-toe "zipper" pattern was missing a tooth. Meanwhile, too many people were now trying to sleep in the front of the bus. If they looked back, they would have thought that our area was full; it was full, but only because we'd failed to arrange ourselves for maximum packing. We were obnoxious elbow-room grabbers that night without even realizing it.
As long as I'm talking about general life aboard a Green Tortoise bus, a word about luggage. My instructions told me to show up with a big bag and a little day bag. That was a maximum-volume guideline; it wasn't very good specific advice about what bags to bring.
You can't always get at your bags.
Most of the time, your big bag is in a cargo compartment under the bus. If the bus is stopping to let folks out for a hike and your hiking boots are in your big bag, you're SOL. You should have fetched your boots out earlier, the last time the big bags were available.
After the "Miracle", when the bus' interior is basically a big bed, your small bag is hidden away under that bed. If you forgot to get your teddy bear out of there before the Miracle, you are again SOL.
My regret: I only brought one small bag, a daypack. I brought it with me on hikes. But my dayback was also the only place I had to keep everything I needed for the day. Our big bags only came out once a day. On a hike, I didn't want to carry my dirty laundry, my kindle, my toiletries, ... I didn't want to carry all my crap. But if I wanted to get at that stuff after the hike, I didn't have another place to put it. If I had it to do over again, I'd have brought a gym bag or something.
It's strange to write so much about bags. But if I'd brought another bag, I could have thought less about bags (and about physical possessions in general) on this trip. And would have through more about the important stuff.
Drivers of bus and/or drivers of tourists:
The scruffy backpacker ensemble:
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