Week 5 Adult Memoir

For sports teams, there's one problem when it comes to away games- they are a long ways away. In leagues like senior league, you of course drive yourself, unless it's to another state or something. But school leagues generally have buses. The ride down often is entertaining and a good way to get to know players better. School buses usually are used for high schools and such, but colleges generally can and do get better.

Like our college. No one on our baseball team really knew what type of bus we would have for our first trip down. It turned out to be a Bar Harbor tour bus. It wasn't a bad bus, except that it had no bathroom, and every other seat had the floor sticking up so that only one person could sit there. But it wasn't bad, and the driver was very nice and fast.

Of course, we would have had nicer buses, except that we were a new program. Eventually we got Cyr buses, with bathrooms and televisions. And curtains, and other helpful things.

Bus rides are often long. But they're often fun. With things like a bunch of players singing badly, or such. Things like playing with our equipment manager is fun. Like when some of the players were throwing things at him, and kept missing. Then they gave me an important mission: hit him hard in the head with a crumpled up McDonalds bag. I was closer than them, but still a good ways away, but hit him directly in the head. "I thought we were friends," was his response.

We started getting really nice Cyr buses. Occasionally, we would get a "party bus." Large and black, it has seats that go around the outside, so that we are all facing each other. The entire back wall is a huge television, and there are coolers and flashing lights. It was fun taking it down to the playoffs, considering that a cyr bus was the best the other teams had, some of them just had vans. Some of the players from one team actually were looking inside.

Sometimes we have to ride with the softball team, which can result in things such as: "This means war!" as they throw coins back and forth from one end of the bus to the other. This ended when one of the softball players threw a battery and hit one of our players in the head, leaving him with a bruise.

Altogether, the buses are only a way of transport, but the variation through the last couple of years has been interesting.