I am going to try to put together a proper post on the Buffalo trip, focusing on how the Albright-Knox expansion has changed the overall experience, which indeed was the only reason I was down in Buffalo in the first place. However, I want to use this post to talk about the times trips went wrong, sometimes disastrously so, though not catastrophically (so far).
Early on in my travelling career, I often managed to get home despite bad weather. In one case (though I have forgotten the precise details), I had to sprint through the airport and just managed to board a connecting flight just as the gate was closing. Then after moving to Toronto, I had a period where things started going wrong more often. I got food poisoning, almost certainly from bad yogurt in the Regina airport, and ended up having to cancel a trip to NYC. I had planned to visit my father with my children in tow, and some freak snowstorm forced a cancellation of that trip. That was a pretty bad day, and I still to this day despise the school administrators that schedule "spring break" at such a stupid time at the beginning of March or even late Feb.! When clearly it should be at the very tail end of March or early April. Grumble, grumble, grumble. While I am not (exactly) superstitious, that doesn't mean I don't make sure to seek out the statues of Ganesh (the patron saint of travellers) when I am in a museum with an Asian art wing (generally that would be Chicago's Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Fine Arts Museum or of course the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I even have a small statuette of Ganesh on my desk at home (and a much smaller version that I have ironically misplaced for the moment...)
Thinking over some recent trips and the way things went wrong, in one case the blame fell on me, in one case the blame could be evenly split between me and Google, and the rest were clearly out of my control.
The first case was going down to Cleveland in 2015 (not long after relocating to Toronto in fact) to see a blockbuster show about painters painting gardens. I only hinted in this post at just how stressful it was after leaving the museum and realizing that the main bus line wasn't going to take me back to the Greyhound station. What I really ought to have done was to get someone at the information desk to order me a cab, but they were a bit busy and I just figured it wouldn't be an issue. I will not make this mistake again, and I was more than ready to ask for help in Buffalo yesterday, though in the end I didn't need it. This was quite stressful, and I ended up getting a cab and getting to the station with only a relatively small margin of error. The main issue was I needed to get back to Buffalo to catch another Greyhound bus to Toronto!
The second case was a relatively recent trip to New York. This trip in general was a bit cursed. I went there specifically to see The Fixx in concert. The keyboard player broke his hand, and the concert was cancelled the day of. I was not notified through a really strange series of issues, starting with the way that the Newark Airport was incredibly stingy about wi-fi for passengers that had already arrived and were waiting in the luggage area. Then I couldn't get the free wi-fi in Times Square to work. And absolutely shamefully, no one at the concert hall could be bothered to stick up a paper sign on the door that the concert was called off (and indeed their electronic marquee kept saying The Fixx was on that evening)! It was incredibly frustrating. Then I saw Stoppard's Arcadia the next evening. It was ok, but not an amazing production, and, had I known everything, I wouldn't have made the trip, despite enjoying the museums and picking up some great books at the Strand. At any rate, on my last morning in NYC, I decided I wanted to start at Grand Central, then do a bit of an architecture tour, walking all the way down to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and then walking back up to Penn Station. I suppose if I had another dollar on my transit card, I would have taken the subway for at least one of the legs. All of this would have been fine, but when I got over to Penn Station, I had missed one of the NJ Transit trains to Newark Airport by 5 minutes and then the next one was about a 40 minute wait! Google had given me the weekday schedule, but the weekend schedule was quite different! I was absolutely livid, but really didn't have any alternative but to wait. The only saving grace was that Porter was all by itself in a separate part of Newark Airport and the security line was very short. Otherwise, I might well have missed my flight. Or rather I might have if the flight left on time, but there was a problem with the airplane and a replacement jet had to be found, and I think in the end, we left close to 2 or even 3 hours late. So definitely not the best trip on many levels.
Now I'll move on to some examples of things that were far outside my control.
When I went to Detroit last Oct. (and it appears I have not done a good job at all of posting anything from the visit to the DIA and only just hint at the outlines of the trip here), the gypsy cab I picked up at the Greyhound station didn't take me to the correct destination. I wanted to go to the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art first and then would walk up to the DIA. The "cabbie" dropped me off at the wrong one, and the contemporary art museum, while it was supposed to be open late, actually was closed to the public and was throwing a members' gala, which pissed me off. Getting to the hotel after wrapping up the DIA visit was quite a struggle. I had checked the website for where to get transit passes. One of the stores no longer existed and the other one said that they absolutely did not sell day passes there. So that was a major issue. I ended up on this LRT that ran down Woodward Ave., and I only finally figured out that it was free (whether it is always free or this is a temporary promotion isn't clear), so this is another area where the city of Detroit is not doing itself any favors with such poor/flawed communication on the internet. I made it downtown, and then just missed another bus and so walked to the hotel. I arranged for a cab in the morning, since I wasn't staying particularly close to the Greyhound station, and the bus was leaving fairly early. I definitely did not want to spend an extra day in Detroit! Anyway, the cab simply never showed up. I asked a few people pulling up into the parking lot whether they were the driver, but none of them were. In fact, one of them was a hotel employee. So I went back to the front desk, and they called around, trying to find the missing cab, and finally ordered up another gypsy cab. Again, I made it back to Greyhound but not by very much. I'm simply not going to go back to Detroit unless I have access to a car, and most likely I won't be going back at all. Maybe if the train between Detroit and Toronto is restarted I would consider it again. At the moment, you have to get back over to Windsor, and, quite stupidly, the Windsor-Detroit tunnel bus doesn't actually make a stop at the Windsor Via station.
Art museum stupidities were behind problems with my last trip to Montreal. I had everything worked out for an overnight visit to see the Marisol exhibit at the Montreal Fine Arts Museum and then to see a Shostakovich concert that evening. By the time I showed up (but not when I had booked everything), the museum decided to have their fund raising gala on the Sat. and the entire museum was closed off. (Honestly, I find this completely inexcusable to not have this in the middle of the week and to disrupt the tourist trade so much...) That was bad enough, but then they weren't going to reopen until Sunday around noon. I can't remember all the details, but my train back was 11:30 or noon, so that meant I would miss the Marisol. As if that weren't bad enough, Via picked that weekend to upgrade its booking software, so it was literally impossible to get through and change reservations! After the concert (which itself was stressful as the proper venue address wasn't on the tickets), I called and the upgrades still hadn't been completed. At one point, I was on hold for over an hour only to find that they still couldn't fix my booking as the upgrades still hadn't been completed. When I finally did get through, the price they wanted for a 1 pm or 4 pm train back to Toronto was ridiculous. Ultimately, I booked a bus ride back and tried to switch the ticket to a date in February, losing quite a bit of money in the process.* I enjoyed the Marisol show (and indeed there were a couple of pieces that weren't going to be in the Buffalo edition of the show oddly enough), but the whole thing was annoying and down to the very poor decision making on the part of the museum.
Which brings me to the recent trip down to Buffalo. In general, it went quite smoothly until the very end. We actually got down to border and through immigrations a little early, and I had time to catch the local bus up to the Albright-Knox. I'll write about that part of the trip a little later. At any rate, it only took 2.5 hours to see everything in the museum, while I had mentally budgeted 4 or 5 hours, so I decided I probably didn't need to cab it back to the Greyhound station and could save money on cab fare. I actually slipped across the road to check out a small art museum, called the Burchfield Penney, connected to Buffalo State University. I'd never been in before, so checked that out for a bit over a half hour. I had planned to eat a late lunch, and in fact the cafe at the Burchfield Penney looked pretty good but was overcrowded. The Subway where I usually ate before or after visiting the Albright-Knox was gone and the restaurant next to that was also permanently closed, so I ended up walking down Elmwood Ave. for a few blocks. I found a decent-looking Greek place that also had falafel wraps, so I got one of those. While I still had quite a bit of time, the bus schedule is particularly crap on the weekends. The bus only runs ever 40 minutes on Sat., and every 50 minutes on Sun. If you miss the bus, it is really quite a tragedy. Even weekday service isn't much better (every 20 minutes), but at that frequency, I would have gone a few more blocks (and run into a few more interesting restaurants) and probably popped into a record store I had seen on the trip up. Fortunately, once my wrap was ready I ran over to the bus stop, and the bus pulled up in about 2 more minutes, so that was lucky timing. I got back to the Greyhound station and had basically an hour to kill. The station was always a bit rundown, but it is considerably worse since COVID hit. The Tim Horton's has closed, and nothing has replaced it.
The bathrooms really do appear to be outfitted with prison-style facilities. The number of street people with nothing better to do than hang out at the station and beg has swelled. As I was waiting, there was some huge argument, leading to a fight, and the cops finally chased everyone without a ticket out of the station. At this point, the delays kicked in because the bus back to Toronto had broken down, and they were waiting on another bus from somewhere else before we could leave. In the end, I think the bus left Buffalo 90 minutes late, and the driver made up about 30 minutes, assisted greatly by the fact that there are no stops on the route after getting through Canadian customs! So certainly not a major disruption compared to these other disruptions, but still a bit annoying and certainly out of my control. I spent just a short time walking around downtown Buffalo (it was quite frigid that day), and it seems even more desolate than before, with that rundown mall from previous trips (see the tail end of this post) completely closed and even the Rite Aid near the public library having vanished. Perhaps surprisingly, I did see one sign of gentrification, as there was a slightly upscale grocery store just a few blocks from the Greyhound station, but overall, Buffalo just feels very rundown and deserted. I really can't imagine spending the night there, and I was quite happy to get out of Buffalo, even if over an hour late.
I've certainly had my share of airplane troubles recently. In addition to the problem of getting back from Newark, I was on a flight that tried to take off twice and simply couldn't make it off the ground! I'm blanking on the exact details, but I think that may have been leaving Boston and heading to New York. Obviously, I eventually made it wherever I was headed. In general, these all rank as minor or major annoyances, but so far, knock wood, nothing truly disastrous has occurred during my travels.
* Sadly, lightning is about to strike twice, because I got word a while back that the Kronos Quartet concert in February was cancelled (probably due to low ticket sales astonishingly enough). There is no point in staying over two nights in Montreal, so I need to cancel one night in the hotel, and then see what Via charges for a late afternoon train (instead of a Monday morning train I have booked). But I expect at this point, after the change fees, the ticket will have no value, and I'll end up busing it back again. I need to try to deal with this on Monday (or Tuesday if it is impossible to get anything done on Family Day).
Edit (02-20): I was fortunately able to drop down from two nights to only one night in the hotel in Montreal, even though technically the hotel didn't need to make the change. Sadly, Via was not as accommodating, and my Monday morning ticket is now completely worthless. The fare for different trips between Montreal and Toronto on Sunday were all generally over $150, and the ones that meshed with my schedule the best were $200. (Just not a fan of the variable pricing that Via gets up to!) So I will end up busing it to Ottawa, taking a very short Via trip to Montreal and then busing it back the next day after seeing the museum. That is a lot of time spent on buses, so I will bring a particularly long book for the rides (probably Steinbeck's East of Eden) and try to remember to bring a power adapter for my iPod. Not that I expect to make this exact trip any time soon, but the next really long train or bus ride I will probably take a Dickens novel (possibly Dombey and Son) and the one after that might be Mutis's Maqroll series.
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