Whee, harrock and I are home from Madison, after a very long journey.

We were supposed to return Sunday evening, when the flight into Boston got cancelled. Calling Frontier, after 45 minutes on hold (though apparently this was better than all the people who just got hung up on by their airlines), they offered us a flight back on Friday. That's when I started looking into other methods of getting back. Trains - all booked. Buses - take about 24 hours, but they seem to be running all the way to Boston. After another hour on hold, Jerry managed to get an offer of Wednesday night out of American, but at that point it looked like the bus would get us back Monday night, only a day late.

That is, a bus from Chicago. So the whole thing starts out by driving from Madison to Chicago (which I no longer find surprising, because we had to do that *last* time there was a weather emergency), finding a steak house for dinner (well, it's Chicago, that's what you're supposed to eat, and we didn't expect much reasonable food for the next day), and then trundling from the train station (where the rental cars live) to the bus station, which involved a bit of walking in all the wrong directions first. ("Okay, there are only four directions to go in from this intersection. *One* of them has to be right...").

Then, much bus. The Border Patrol came on the bus to hassle foreign students at the Erie and ?Westfield? stops. Because that's totally how illegals sneak into the country - via the bus from Cleveland.

At Buffalo, they told us that there were no longer buses between Albany and Boston; they seemed kind of keen to have everyone stop there, which I found somewhat mystifying - why not get us as far as possible before stopping? With a lot of persuasion ("Really, we know people in Syracuse and Albany! Let us go there!"), they finally let us through further. It turned out that mjperson was no longer in Albany, but shumashi was still in Syracuse, so we called her and were rescued from the bus station. At that point, the opportunity for tooth-brushing and showers and Real Food and Real Bed and everything was a godsend, and we are still doing the happy gratitude dance for that. (By the way - the bathrooms in the Buffalo bus station? Just as bad as you've ever heard about bus station bathrooms being.)

The next morning, we lazed through two whole bus opportunities and then set out again, well-provisioned and rested, for the last bus legs (though I did forget my knitting bag, which shumashi had to rescue separately). Following our progress along on GPS, I was mystified by this loop ("Wait, *which* direction is Springfield from here? Did we take a wrong turn?") but it looks like the bus was not actually lost, it's just a weird interchange.

Then, we finally got to South Station at about 8:30, where we were rescued by justom and chanaleh who whooshed us to dinner and then home. Where our porch (and also the sidewalk, though buried by later plowing) had been shoveled by a minion of chenoameg, though I do not know which minion it was to be properly grateful to!

And now, I'm back at work, for my exactly one day of productivity before more holidays...