Yaaaaay California. I haven't seen anything but pitch darkness of it yet, but I sure have had enough excitement for a week already. Uhm... Let me start with the beginning...
As the Greyhound buses don't offer very good cooling facilities for food, the only edibles worth bringing on long bus trips are fruits and vegetables. So, as I always do, I went to a grocery store before I got on the bus in Oregon, and bought quite a lot of fruit to help me survive. In this case it was 10-12 peaches, a cantaloupe and some huge, red apples. Yummmmy.
So, I had a perfectly fine evening, improving my fruit eating skills. But then! Around 22:30 the bus slowed down and stopped... Someone whistled the opening theme from "Twilight Zone", and I got the feeling something wasn't right. This feeling became stronger when I felt the bus tilt down to the right, promptly followed by a huuuuuge woman in a uniform appearing in the front of the bus. And she yelled: "DOES ANYBODY HAVE ANY FRUIT OR VEGETABLES IN HERE?!". I was rather surprised by this, so I looked confused around at the other passengers. They seemed to be more or less asleep, and I decided to join them. I closed my eyes and hoped this would be over soon. It almost was...
The woman disappeared, and the bus slowly started moving. 5 metres... 10 metres... And stopped. The doors opened, and I didn't feel to happy about it when the woman again entered the bus, this time bringing two rather nasty looking way too large dogs. Uh-oh. Think quick, Bjørn. Think quick! I am rather proud of myself for what I came up with two hundredths of a second later. I simply poured some orange juice on my shorts and my paper bag with the fruit, and pushed the bag under the seat. Now I could only hope that my plan would work. It did! The dogs came closer and closer. Two seats in front of me they found three apples in a small bag. Noone knew whose apples those were. The uhm... previous owner looked really surprised, and no, the KFC in the bag weren't her's either. Of course.
Not surprisingly, the dogs showed a lot of interest in me, but I smiled the sweetest I could, and explained how I had had a little accident with the juice container, and that was definitely the reason the dogs found me so interesting. "Hrrfgrlllmpf Kzrenrekkgt!", the woman said, and pulled the dogs with her further down the aisle of the bus. And then she left.
Later I learned that bringing fruit into California is VERY illegal, as they are afraid of some Mediterranean fly getting into California. "Can't they just make some fly repellant?", you probably ask. They probably can, but it is more convenient to prevent it this way, I guess. And they can sell a lot more fruit as well, possibly. They DO grow a lot of fruit, that's for sure.
Anyways, I am in California. In a couple of hours I'll be in Sacramento, unless the 250kgs of busdriver suddenly suffers from a heart attack and drives us all into certain death in the deep valley next to the road here. Judging from the looks of him, it is not very unlikely to happen. Still, he is far away from being the strangest person on the bus. This weird collection of people should be a mighty fine way to get used to California in general, I think. I am having fun. And not being caught with the fruit saved me $150. #:O)