School bus drivers have their regular morning and afternoon routes. You pick up and drop off the same kids morning and afternoon every school day. It’s very routine. I find myself looking forward to special activity trips that give me a break from the routine. The special activity trips might be anything from driving the volleyball team to a match to taking the sixth graders to a natural history museum. However, not all activity trips are equal.

An easy activity trip is one that takes you to a place with little traffic and lots of parking space for a bus. I find the majority of activity trips for our school district fit the easy category to one degree or another. I drove to Mt. Pleasant the other day. I was able to drop the team at the front doors of the high school and then drive to the public library where I could do some writing. A couple of hours later I had a bite to eat and then drove back to the school in time to catch the varsity match. It was a pleasant trip.

A few weeks back I had a trip on the other end of the spectrum. I drove the cross country team to a picturesque city up in the mountains for a huge meet. I like driving the cross country team. They are well-mannered kids and are fun to watch run. It was the location that made this such an obnoxious trip.

Another bus driver had told me about her experience a couple of years before. She had dropped the kids at the venue—a place that has absolutely no parking for buses. You are supposed to go park at the high school. The difficulty is that drivers new to this location can’t find the high school. The high school is built in conjunction with a performing arts center and happens to look like the performing arts center, not a high school. She had gotten lost looking for the high school and found herself on the extremely narrow roads on the hillside of this “charming” old mining town. She had a miserable experience.

I have unexpectedly found myself on narrow back roads in a bus, too, and took her warning to heart. I dropped the team off at the venue via a narrow two lane road with two little parking lots just barely big enough to turn a bus around. There would be thirty buses so, of course, no room to park. I went searching for the high school which was supposed to be about a mile up the road. I saw a bus in front of me and decided to follow it hoping that the driver had been here before. I was right that the drive had been here before. I was wrong in assuming he was going to the high school. I followed him into a school complex where I saw eight buses already parked. They were parked nose to tail very closely in a double line, which was unusual, but I thought this must be how they do it here. They I noticed that all the buses were from the same school district—the district of the city I was in. To my horror I realized that I was in the bus pickup line for an elementary school. All those buses were picking up the local students for the afternoon drop. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Local bus drivers are ornery about “other-district” drivers getting in their way. Luckily I was able to pull aside (barely enough room) and get out of the way. There was no way to leave until all the other buses left. Finally I made my escape.

I drove toward town worried that I was going to miss the high school and end up on those narrow mountainside roads. I saw a some buses parked in front of a building that did not look like a high school (it was). The parking lot was full of cars, but there was a curb with enough room for a few buses. I pulled in not caring if it was the high school or not and parked at the curb. Now there would be a four hour wait. It turned out I was only there forty-five minutes before a man came by telling all of us that we had to move our buses somewhere else because they needed this curb for the local shuttle to the meet. Argh! I found room around on the other side of the performing arts center with fourteen other buses parked higgledy-piggledy amid the cars. For such a large meet the planning for transportation was very poor. I usually like to find a good place to watch the kids run and cheer them on, but I couldn’t at this venue. Instead I had to stick around the bus. I read a book, took a nap, and walked around the parking lot for exercise.

After four hours I got a call from one of the coaches. He wanted me to get there fast “and, for heaven’s sake, stay out of the line of buses picking up the teams on that narrow road.” It would take an hour-and-a-half to cycle through that line. He had a fine idea, but how else was I supposed to pick up the team? It seemed the only other alternative was to park on the busy four-lane highway and have them come to me. That was not a viable alternative. As I approached the venue and saw that creeping line of buses I was motivated to find a way to avoid it. I saw a possibility and formulated a plan. The plan required a couple of U-turns that, while not dangerous (if timed right), made me uncomfortable. I ended up parking temporarily on an unused sidewalk with three other buses. I called the coach and the team came to me. Off we went returning home an hour-and-a-half sooner.

The coaches showed a little appreciation for my efforts, but not nearly enough. That is definitely not an activity run I want to do next year. Now I appreciate those small town runs with the quaint little libraries even more. I drop the kids, then find the library and kick back in an overstuffed chair amid shelves crowded with books and walls covered with colorful posters. I can catch the end of the games, meets, or matches and then drive back after an enjoyable afternoon and evening. I will to keep these runs in mind as my “happy place” when I find myself on the next monster run.