On trips into downtown Colorado Springs, the younger version of myself loved it when my grandfather would wheel his Chrysler E-Class down Weber Street towards the Greyhound bus station, where fleets of gigantic silver machines would rumble down the city streets towards Interstate 25 and all points beyond. I thought that riding the bus across the country was the way to go…let the driver do the work while I sit and watch the world move past me from the air-conditioned comfort of a road-going luxury liner. Stop laughing, this was my brain at work when I was five years old. I learned what that really entailed about ten years later, when the summer of 1999 involved three cross-country trips via Greyhound. Cramped quarters, diesel fumes and in one memorable stretch, a malfunctioning toilet in the middle of the warm part of June that is still one of my top forms of endured hell. I learned, all right.
But comparing your typical Greyhound bus to a lovingly converted ex-coach is a disservice. This 1983 MCI looks the part like all of those buses I saw roaming the terminals circa 1988, but inside it’s a far cry from rows of narrow, super-stiff seats designed to punish buttcheeks for hours on end. The interior of this bus isn’t some super-fancy decked out dream home on wheels kind of setup. It’s traditional, well-sorted and all of the seating surfaces look nice and comfortable…especially the throne that the driver will sit on as the miles click off. It looks like someone took the seat from a 1975 New Yorker and stuffed it twice over just to make sure the driver’s backside feels exactly no pain whatsoever.
Simple, durable, clean, all packaged inside an all-metal bus that looks nice and classic. It certainly beats a gutted school bus with a mattress laid in the back, doesn’t it?
about 20k over priced