Bus Driver Diaries — Monster Trips

School bus drivers have their regular morning and afternoon routes. You pick up and drop off the same kids morning and afternoon every school day. It s very routine. I find myself looking forward to special activity trips that give me a break from the routine. The special activity trips might be anything from driving the volleyball team to a match to taking the sixth graders to a natural history museum. However, not all activity trips are equal.

An easy activity trip is one that takes you to a place with little traffic and lots of parking space for a bus. I find the majority of activity trips for our school district fit the easy category to one degree or another. I drove to Mt. Pleasant the other day. I was able to drop the team at the front doors of the high school and then drive to the public library where I could do some writing. A couple of hours later I had a bite to eat and then drove back to the school in time to catch the varsity match. It was a pleasant trip.

A few weeks back I had a trip on the other end of the spectrum. I drove the cross country team to a picturesque city up in the mountains for a huge meet. I like driving the cross country team. They are well-mannered kids and are fun to watch run. It was the location that made this such an obnoxious trip.

Another bus driver had told me about her experience a couple of years before. She had dropped the kids at the venue a place that has absolutely no parking for buses. You are supposed to go park at the high school. The difficulty is that drivers new to this location can t find the high school. The high school is built in conjunction with a performing arts center and happens to look like the performing arts center, not a high school. She had gotten lost looking for the high school and found herself on the extremely narrow roads on the hillside of this charming old mining town. She had a miserable experience.

I have unexpectedly found myself on narrow back roads in a bus, too, and took her warning to heart. I dropped the team off at the venue via a narrow two lane road with two little parking lots just barely big enough to turn a bus around. There would be thirty buses so, of course, no room to park. I went searching for the high school which was supposed to be about a mile up the road. I saw a bus in front of me and decided to follow it hoping that the driver had been here before. I was right that the drive had been here before. I was wrong in assuming he was going to the high school. I followed him into a school complex where I saw eight buses already parked. They were parked nose to tail very closely in a double line, which was unusual, but I thought this must be how they do it here. They I noticed that all the buses were from the same school district the district of the city I was in. To my horror I realized that I was in the bus pickup line for an elementary school. All those buses were picking up the local students for the afternoon drop. I wasn t supposed to be there. Local bus drivers are ornery about other-district drivers getting in their way. Luckily I was able to pull aside (barely enough room) and get out of the way. There was no way to leave until all the other buses left. Finally I made my escape.

I drove toward town worried that I was going to miss the high school and end up on those narrow mountainside roads. I saw a some buses parked in front of a building that did not look like a high school (it was). The parking lot was full of cars, but there was a curb with enough room for a few buses. I pulled in not caring if it was the high school or not and parked at the curb. Now there would be a four hour wait. It turned out I was only there forty-five minutes before a man came by telling all of us that we had to move our buses somewhere else because they needed this curb for the local shuttle to the meet. Argh! I found room around on the other side of the performing arts center with fourteen other buses parked higgledy-piggledy amid the cars. For such a large meet the planning for transportation was very poor. I usually like to find a good place to watch the kids run and cheer them on, but I couldn’t at this venue. Instead I had to stick around the bus. I read a book, took a nap, and walked around the parking lot for exercise.

After four hours I got a call from one of the coaches. He wanted me to get there fast and, for heaven s sake, stay out of the line of buses picking up the teams on that narrow road. It would take an hour-and-a-half to cycle through that line. He had a fine idea, but how else was I supposed to pick up the team? It seemed the only other alternative was to park on the busy four-lane highway and have them come to me. That was not a viable alternative. As I approached the venue and saw that creeping line of buses I was motivated to find a way to avoid it. I saw a possibility and formulated a plan. The plan required a couple of U-turns that, while not dangerous (if timed right), made me uncomfortable. I ended up parking temporarily on an unused sidewalk with three other buses. I called the coach and the team came to me. Off we went returning home an hour-and-a-half sooner.

The coaches showed a little appreciation for my efforts, but not nearly enough. That is definitely not an activity run I want to do next year. Now I appreciate those small town runs with the quaint little libraries even more. I drop the kids, then find the library and kick back in an overstuffed chair amid shelves crowded with books and walls covered with colorful posters. I can catch the end of the games, meets, or matches and then drive back after an enjoyable afternoon and evening. I will to keep these runs in mind as my happy place when I find myself on the next monster run.