Stop 3 – Albany, NY
One of the perks of this trip is the fact that I’ll get to visit places of the country I’ve never been. Such as Albany NY. At almost midnight on a Friday night. Lucky me. Stop 3 is my longest of the trip, scheduled for 40 minutes, but since we arrived ahead of schedule, it’ll end up being a little closer to an hour.
This was my first time off the bus, and now that I had secured such a prime seat, I was hesitant to give it up. Of course that was outweighed by my hesitancy to leave anything on the bus and I was ready to see what my first dinner options would be, so off the bus I went.
Albany bus station is a dismal place. I feel like I have a fairly negative connotation of bus stations from movies and tv shows and it’s very possible that this place provided the inspiration for all of them. I walked in expecting an interstate rest stop but found a set for the Walking Dead. No golden arches or five dollar footlongs here, the only sustenance I spotted initially was a cluster of vending machines with some questionable characters slowly drifting around the building. As I came to terms with my imminent dinner from a machine, I took one more look around the shabby building and realized that a sectioned off room which I had initially perceived to be an arcade was in fact a restaurant / arcade / giftshop abomination.
They had a small selection of prepackaged sandwiches and again I figured this was the best I’d find until I realized there was a faded menu on the back wall with a small listing of fresh food. I ended up choosing the BLT and grabbing a juice, with a total cost of just over $7. This brings up my “generous” food stipend. Throughout the year, we have a number of finable offenses and this year the total fines collected equaled $55. The league decided that of that pool, I should be given $22 as a stipend for the trip. I expect that’ll be gone sometime tomorrow, but we’ll see.
Life is all about perspective. For example, a few hours ago, I was complaining about the bus seat and anxious to get up. As I hurriedly ate my dinner while attempting to both keep an eye on my surroundings while not making direct eye contact with any of the tweakers wandering aimlessly, I realized that I wanted to get back on the bus.
