One Ticket

I’m a passenger on a bus to Baguio, my wife beside me.

We’re headed up to renew Lyn’s license. The only appointment we could get anywhere in the country right now is up here — a few hours up into the mountains from where we’d been in Manila — so we figured we’d make a little vacation out of the errand. That’s how a lot of our best trips start: something we have to do, turned into something we get to enjoy.

As we go, the flat farmlands give way to lush green. The air turns cooler. Fog settles into the hills ahead of us, the way it always seems to up here. And somewhere along that climb, I start to lose myself in my thoughts.

The older I get, the more I do this — think, and think, and think some more. Sometimes more than is good for a man. But the bus is long and the view is green, so I let it run.

It starts practical. I’m looking at the system — the buses, the terminals, the way people move here — and thinking about what we could shoot for Pilgrimage to Passport, the channel Lyn and I run together. Travel days make good footage. The bus, the climb, the arrival. I’m filing it away.

Then my mind jumps continents, the way it does. I start thinking about a trip I want to take once we’re back stateside — the California Zephyr, the Amtrak line that runs from Emeryville, just across the bay from San Francisco, all the way to Chicago. Two days on a train through the Sierra and the Rockies and the long flat middle of the country. I’ve had it parked in the back of my head for a while. And I’m thinking about the romance of it, the rareness of it — because in America, a trip like that is a novelty. Something you do for the trip, not to actually get somewhere.

That’s where the daydream turns into something bigger.

Because here’s what’s about to happen when we reach Baguio. We’ll get off the bus. We’ll walk to the hotel. And that’s fine, this time — the hotel’s close. But I start thinking: what if it wasn’t? What if the station dropped us a long way from where we needed to be, the way they so often do? And the thought keeps going. What if you could buy one ticket — one — that carried you the whole way? Bus to train to plane, and back down to a bus on the far end. One confirmation. Your bag checked through. If the bus ran late, the train holds for you, or rebooks you, the way an airline does for a missed connection. No seams. No starting over at every transfer. Just go.

We don’t have that. Not in the States, and not really anywhere I’ve traveled. We’ve got modes — buses here, trains there, planes above it all — and they mostly pretend the others don’t exist. You stitch the journey together yourself, ticket by ticket, app by app, hoping the timing holds. And if you live somewhere small, somewhere the train doesn’t reach and the airport’s three hours off, the honest answer is usually: drive, or don’t go.

This is one of those thoughts I can’t put down. Maybe because I’ve spent my whole life moving between places — Guam, California, the Philippines — and the moving is never the easy part. It’s the seams. The gaps between the modes, the gaps nobody owns, the gaps where a trip stops being an adventure and starts being a logistics problem.

So somewhere on this mountain road, I start building the thing in my head. What it would take. Who’d have to be at the table. Why the companies you’d expect to fight a future like this might be the ones to build it, if you set it up right. It gets detailed enough that I figure I ought to write it down properly — somewhere with room to make the whole case.

For now, though, I’m just a passenger on a bus, my wife beside me, the farmland behind us and the fog coming down to meet us. The daydream can keep. We’ve got a hotel that’s close, this time. We’ll walk.

But if you want to know what I actually think it could look like — the whole far-fetched blueprint, the one ticket and everything behind it — I wrote it all up [here]. Pour a coffee first. It’s a lot.