Kinsler | There goes the neighborhood

The 40-hour Greyhound bus ride eastbound from Las Vegas goes along I-15 north through the Virgin River Gorge, then turns right in Utah onto the very start of I-70, past volcanic rock pinnacles into Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.

Around 3 a.m. in Grand Junction, Colorado, we picked up our new driver Cynthia, a composed young woman who has driven for Greyhound for years. On the road once more, we watched the sun rise over the Rockies, admiring Cynthia’s driving while cruising through 7,500-foot mountain passes.

But what we did not know was our bus was running poorly, unable to maintain speed up the mountain grades. And ahead of us lay the Loveland Pass, elevation 11,000 feet, even with the Eisenhower Tunnels drilled deep through the highest mountains.

So at the next stop Cynthia called Greyhound Operations, who said the problem was a clogged filter in the exhaust system. There’s a procedure by which the clog can sometimes be burned out, only this time it didn’t work: we’d have to wait for a replacement bus from Denver. And the town we were stuck in was none other than Vail, Colorado, perhaps the fanciest municipality in the nation.

Vail’s Greyhound stop is predictably exquisite and includes the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Museum. We, on the other hand, were a notably diverse lot, somewhat scruffy after a sleepless night on the road. We had an old guy from Ecuador going to live with his daughter in New Jersey, a frightened young mother and her two kids running to safety in Wyoming, exuberant young men with their girlfriends, fishing rods and skateboards, an ancient lady on her way to Detroit, a flock of teenagers permanently plugged into their smartphones, and us.

We clearly did not fit the image of Vail, with its multi-million dollar condominiums and its own fashion designers. Vail women in expensive sports gear jogged past, direct from the pages of L.L. Bean, and stared at us. Shortly afterward, a carefully-dressed official lady appeared and requested Cynthia kindly remove her crippled bus and its, ah, passengers. A frontage road several miles down the road was suggested.

Not wishing to attract the sheriff, Cynthia piled us back into the old machine and we coughed our way to a breakdown lane near an outlying shopping center. We told our story to the puzzled manager of the Kroger, and when I suggested we might be seen as a threat to local property values, the fellow collapsed in laughter. That, he said, was precisely it, and we wondered how it must be to work for Vail’s royalty.

Anyway, the supermarket had a charging station and a café, so Natalie and I checked our email, sharing a bowl of soup and a ham sandwich: her birthday dinner, it turned out. We strolled around to the other stores, gabbed with our fellow castaways, and admired the mountains.

Then there was a shout and the replacement bus pulled up. I helped move the luggage, and we were off once more.

Mark Kinsler is a science teacher from Cleveland Heights who lives with Natalie and the four cats in an old house in Lancaster. He can be reached at kinsler33@gmail.com and does not know how to ski.