Well I uploaded my last post as the conductor was calling six minutes to Bakersfield and going through the six different buses and their destinations meeting the train. I feel like I am about to get off the Rocky Mountaineer with all their buses for the tourists. We arrived a bit early at 7:26 and I realize I’m at the opposite end of the platform that connects to the buses. I walk over to the long and slow line at bus 1, the express to Union Station, and am told it is for passengers making onward train connections only and those ending travel at Union Station must take bus #2 stopping at Burbank and Glendale along the way, something I have no interest in. The line for that is even more of mayhem and I overhear that the direct to LA bus will leave as soon as it is full. I go back to that bus and the driver doesn’t remember me and lets me on, finding only empty aisle seats. I choose one and am surrounded by two ladies and three girls exactly my year all going to visit their boyfriends who had befriended each other on the train and had chatted all the way down, I never plugging my headphones in and trying to doze off, my plan for the bus ride. None of them had ever ridden the route before. The most amusing was one who though the LAX code on their ticket meant they were going to the airport, not Union Station. The bus came in 20 minutes early as I hoped at 9:30. I walked in from the bus loop which is right at baggage claim all closed off and by the Express Shipping Counter where I saw my green backpack behind but no sign of an agent. I started walking into the main station to find an employee to help me, saw one walking towards the baggage office, followed her over, she handed me my bag I bought my single-ride (a first) red line ticket at 9:37 and at 10:10 I am at Hollywood/Vine station on a sanding room only two car subway train. I check into the Banana Bungalow Hostel and make my creaky metal bunk bed, missing the quiet bug resort hostel with what I think were Tempra-Pudic mattresses (I have never consciously slept on one before) already.
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