Whenever I have met Americans on this trip and told them I waa going to be travelling around the states on the Greyhound busses, they have looked kind of horrified and asked me why on earth I would want to do that. I think I might now understand why...

We were trying to get from Austin, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which involved a pretty horrific 16 hour journey with changes in Dallas and Amarillo. The busses, as per usual, were late, and me and Mike ended up on a different bus to Matt and Beth. Matt and Beth's bus left about 5 minutes before ours, but in between the two there was an accident on the interstate, and whilst the other two made the connection at Dallas, me and Mike got held up for an hour and missed it. On arrival at Dallas we were told that we had a 5 hour wait for the next bus, which would get us in to Amarillo in the early hours of the morning, and then involve another 5 hour wait for the connecting bus to Albuquerque. We wouldn't be arriving until late afternoon the next day, and would be pretty much wiped out for the next day as well after an epic 24 hour journey. Fortunately we had met a Buddist monk on the journey from Austin, who was up for sharing a taxi to Fort Worth. He also happened to have the number for a couple of airline companies, so me and Mike decided to ditch the Greyhound and fly to Albuquerque! The flight, fortunately, passed without major incident, and we got to the hostel at 11:15 that night. Unfortunately, we had not been able to get through to the hostel on the phone to let them know we were coming, and they had closed at 11:00, so we were left in a kind of dodgey looking area of town, with nowhere to stay! We ended up checking into a motel, which was just like in the movies, and was a very random way to end the oddest journey of my trip so far!