Millennium Odyssey

I dread long trips on the Viazul buses. They are an excellent way of traveling. No rental car worries, they’re cheap, you can look around while someone else is doing the work of driving, and you are up high enough to see things.

Viazul bus stations are God awful, the washrooms are gross beyond belief. It does not help that the Viazul bus washrooms are locked solid and never unlocked. They’re ‘out of order’, or rather ‘if they were in order I’d have to clean them and I’m not ever going to do that!’ Short Viazul trips means that I can usually go from the casa to the rest stop (usually a palador restaurant with a clean washroom) without a problem.

Three years ago the buses were in much better shape than they are now, and the buses are usually full now where they weren’t in the past. This year we booked our tickets online before we left (you have to do it at least two weeks in advance if you want to book tickets) That meant that we didn’t have to queue up on one day to buy tickets for another day. So you save a good part of a day for every bus ride you had to take. With the Casas filling with Europeans and the buses full, I’m glad we had everything booked before we left. If you are using a station like Playa Largo or Playa Giron where they don’t have real bus stations just a kiosk selling tickets it is a crap shoot if you are going to get on. When you have prepaid tickets, you get on. You have priority, good to know.

We took a different route back to Varadero than we expected, we backtracked via Playa Giron. If I had known that was an option then I might have traveled a different order than when we did but the route had changed a little and the web was behind the times.

But all is well that ended well We arrived at Elisa and Pepe’s. Joan was doing the housework when we arrived. He hadn’t quite got done yet so we dropped off the luggage and left him to his work. We would be back later to do the paperwork.