The Long Ride Home
Bus trips returning home sometimes seem like the longest on earth. 37 hour South American odysseys pass by in the blink of an eye when you compare them with a milk run that turns your 300km return home journey into a 5 hour trial.
There is something anticlimactic about coming home, the route is familiar and you can navigate the station at the end blindfolded…even the hopeful pickpockets are familiar to you.
Coming home from Madrid the other day I caught the last bus heading this way and unbeknownst to me (I didn’t check the arrival times on the internet), the last bus was also the creamiest of milk runs, a bus that stopped at every fly-blown village that lay between the capital and home. At a certain point we even stopped in the middle of nowhere to let someone out, enough to drive you mad…
That is if you let it.
Was I in a hurry? No, not really…an hour here or there wasn’t going to change the fact that I was going to get home too late to really ‘do’ anything anyways.
So I settled back and began to enjoy myself. I decided that even the rather large Nigerian woman sitting beside me (well to be honest, actually her girth was invading my seat) was somewhat interesting.
The ride is beautiful, especially at that time of day. The sun was setting, the central mountain chain turning bluer and bluer on the right. The burnt fields taking on a golden hue aquired as the fierce summer sun abates ever so slightly. Patterned olive groves and unlikely vineyards spread out from the motorway and soon the Holm Oak forests let me know we were closer to home.
A change in perspective, a reminder that, while no longer ‘new’ to me, the beauty was there to enjoy if I just remembered to look for it.
