By Christy Marshall
A buck will buy you a soda (in some vending machines), a couple of packs of gum—or a one-way ticket to Chicago.
No, I’m not on crack.
Log on to megabus.com, pick your date and pay your money. Do it a couple of weeks out and the fee is $1 to go up, $8 to return.
Hear that, Amtrak?
Armed with two round-trip tickets that cost a total of $18, my daughter and I boarded the bus at 7 a.m. sharp in front of Union Station on a recent Saturday. It’s one of those chartered jobs—upholstered seats, a smattering of TVs, no legroom, toilet in the back.
The only stop was one 15-minute swing by the Dixie Truck Stop in Bloomington. (The novelty T-shirts you’ll find there cost less than the bus ticket, but are worth twice as much in tacky-chic humor.) We arrived in the Windy City at 11:45 a.m.—20 minutes ahead of schedule.
On Sunday at 5 p.m., throngs gathered to board for the return trek. For most of the trip, the bus was dark—with the exception of one tyke’s face that was illuminated by the eerie green light of a noisy video game on his father’s cell phone. I couldn’t gripe, though; I’d paid less for two round-trip tickets to Chicago than I do for a movie, popcorn and soda in St. Louis.
