Platy

I'm making a trip from my home in Austin, Texas to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I'm doing a bit of research at the manuscript archives at the university here. This is a long post that takes a look at what I think are some fundamental issues of medium distance ground travel. The air & rental car mode is also carfree of course, and I have done plenty of that in the past. Ground travel calls lots of carfree skills into play and it's interesting to look at from an enthusiast point of view.

Both Austin and Hattiesburg are on Amtrak lines. I've been on the lookout for an opportunity to travel on Amtrak. The last time I did serious Amtrak travelling was in 1976. There has been an improvement in frequency of service in Austin since 30 years ago. However the Amtrak lines Austin and Hattiesburg are on do not connect in any convenient way.

I played around with all kinds of bus-train scenarios. One of the things that drove me mad was that you have to do a city by city analysis of how the train, bus, and local transit stations relate to each other. No one seems to pay much attention to the detailed mechanics of intermodal ground travel. There is a lot of opportunity for improvement. Some cities do have union terminals that connect train, bus and local transit. I think most do not.

With long distance ground travel, it's often good to try to accomplish more than one thing on a single trip. I think the principles are exactly the same as for local carfree errand running. Bearing that in mind, I did come up with a reasonably efficient idea for direct bus from Austin to New Orleans, stopping over in NO to see sights and have a refreshing night of sleep, then catching the Amtrak to Hattiesburg. The thing that makes this feasible is that NO has very nice intermodal connections with notel accommodations nearby.

Ground trips are tricky because there are so many important details to get right. For medium distance bus travel, the optimum for me is to leave late one day, travel overnight, then arrive at the destination the next day in time for hotel checkin and a refreshing night's sleep. Medium distance train travel I think allows the additional opportunity for combining comfortable sleeping and eating with the trip itself.

I chose the bus-only trip. Traveling overnight on a bus is a skill that takes some practice to develop. It falls into the category of you can eventually get used to anything if you work at it. There were three main legs to the bus trip. The trickiest connection was at 3 AM in Dallas, but Dallas ground transit connections are something I have experience with.

(As an aside, I'd say that medium distance bus traveling is a good skill to cultivate if you want to travel cheap in Mexico. Air/car is hundreds of dollars there, Mexican bus is higher quality than Greyhound and costs hundreds of pesos --> a factor of ten difference.)

Planning the hotel/motel is a key in carfree travel. Google is the greatest thing to happen in travel planning in a long time. But it's still not easy. For my trip, the Hattiesburg bus station is close to where I wanted to be in terms of miles, but between the station and my destination is a big intersection of two busy highways. I just couldn't figure out from maps, satellite photos, and the web postings of local cyclists how hard it would be to cross that monster on bike or on foot. Also, the exact mapping of street numbers to maps and photos still leaves a lot to be desired.

All this factored into two decisions, which were choosing the hotel and deciding whether to take my folding bike. Ultimately, I chose a conveniently located motel whose reviews were unanimously bad, and I decided to not take my folding bike.

The motel decision was based on intuition. The large number of negative reviews seemed to relate to maintenance issues caused first by Katrina and second by hard use of the motel by Katrina refugees. The critical point to me was that a few reviewers mentioned that the staff made extra efforts to resolve problems as far as they could. So as they say I paid my money & took my choice.

I had a harder time with deciding whether to take my folding bike. Hattiesburg is the anchor end of the fabled Longleaf Trace, and I'm interested in taking a look at that as well as doing my research project. The basic problem I had is that my KHS folder doesn't quite solve the intermodal transportation problem. It folds up too big to be carryon luggage, and if you check it as baggage you either have (1) the problem that a canvas bag doesn't protect the bike or carry it well, or (2) a hard case or box leaves you with the problems of how to get it to the departure point and what to do with a hard case at the arrival point. Bike Friday's idea of a case that converts to a trailer is one innovative idea, but my KHS is not a BF. I decided to not take my folding bike. The main reason was that while traveling it became a large piece of clumsy luggage. When going somewhere I've never been before, I travel as light as possible to minimize the number of things that can go wrong.

This is how my decisions worked out. I departed from Austin on Greyhound at 10:15 PM Sunday night. I arrived in Hattiesburg at 4 PM the next day. There were not enough seats on the Dallas to Jackson MS leg of the trip for everyone who showed up. Not having to fool with checked baggage possibly made me nimble enough to get one of the available seats on the next bus out. When I arrived in Hattiesburg I saw that my concerns about the possible impassability of the big highway intersection were overblown. On the Google map, the bus station and the motel looked like they were very close together, but in fact they are about a mile apart due to the street numbers going all the way from 6500 to something like 6595 in the block I was interested in.

The wireless internet at the motel didn't work in the room I originally reserved. (It called for a password, and the hotel insisted there was no password.) The clerk at the desk was not in any way a computer expert, but following her ideas and suggestions it became clear that the access point that served my room was misconfigured. She let me sniff around with my laptop outside the doors to find a room where everything worked. Behind the door where my stuff worked best was was a Jacuzzi Suite with lots of nice amenities, so she upgraded me to that room for free. Very nice. I note for future reference that a jacuzzi works okay as a washer for light polyester drip dry travel clothes.

The only problem is that I'm bikeless for now. I haven't yet figured out what to do about that. I hate to be caught without a bike. Maybe the solution is to get a better folder. Right now I don't know the answer.