Goal: No More Hell Rides

Rome2Rio highlights the fastest and cheapest ways to get where you’re going, often surfacing routes you wouldn’t have thought of.

I haven't really used this service. My impression is it doesn't really do what I want.

I wrote about what I want over a year ago elsewhere:

The reality is both buses and trains in the US are terrible for traveling long distances, which is likely why so many people happily take a match to our environment and just buy plane tickets instead.

They are both terrible because they prioritize "getting there" over human comfort, even in cases where people obviously have some other priority themselves or they would just buy plane tickets. Duh!

Human comfort involves eating regularly and having adequate access to "your" food, whatever kind of diet you have, for whatever reason.

What I really, really would like to see is:

The ability to go online and seamlessly book travel plus hotel stays such that I'm not required to be rich enough for a sleeper car to get some sleep on the train trip and I don't have a gun to my head insisting I travel by bus or train for 30 or more hours straight and can, instead, break that up with one or two nights in a hotel such that total cost of travel fare plus hotels is less than "rich enough for a sleeper car."

That maybe isn't very clear. 

I want a comfortable travel experience and I have a serious medical condition. For me, that means convenient access to adequate food and drink that works for me plus reasonable travel logistics that accommodate my condition.

It's miserable for anyone to endure what bus and train travel frequently involves in the US today. For people like me, it's a significant medical hardship.

While I was homeless following an illegal eviction and looking for a new place to settle, a kind stranger bought me and my sons tickets home to see my dying mother one last time a few months before she died.

It was like a 39 hour trip. I had some food stamps and like 18 cents in the bank.

A lot of the limited food options available while traveling, like eateries and vending machines, don't take food stamps at all which further complicated keeping us fed under circumstances where the bus company doesn't really prioritize access to food. They kind of do the minimum.

I have a congenital condition that significantly impacts gut function and my sons both suffer impaired gut function as well, one more than me and one less than me. We all have challenges eating under the best of circumstances and we have enormous difficulty eating while traveling. 

When traveling, we trend towards appetite loss and motion sickness under circumstances where finding friendly foods can be challenging. It's a situation that causes significant medical distress for people living with a life threatening condition.

My sister made the trip unnecessarily longer and more difficult than it really needed to be. My brother was a butt when I finally arrived in town. I've written about that elsewhere.

I'm an environmental studies major. My concern for the environment is baked into the quote above: We make bus and train travel so awful, a lot of people fly knowing it's worse for the environment.

I've done a lot of my traveling in recent years while homeless and trying to get elsewhere to try to make my life work. I've also blogged for years and not made adequate income from it.

This site has languished in part because I've been burned for writing personal anecdotes online. So I don't really want a blog full of personal anecdotes about living without a car.

I've been having trouble finding an angle to which I can strongly relate that I think has broad appeal and at this point I would like to try to frame it as a business with a goal of making money. Blogging and hoping that leads to Patreon supporters and tips isn't really working and I don't know why. I know there are people who make a living that way. I'm not one of them.

But at this point, I'm far from the only person in America with portable income, not much money, significant physical constraints and a concern for the environment. Maybe traveling without a car is a niche I can meaningfully address and which will appeal to an audience.

I haven't flown in YEARS. I used to do that when I had a more middle class lifestyle and serious time constraints because of my more conventional lifestyle. I flew somewhere about every other year at one point.

People who are seriously handicapped and/or retired don't necessarily have those time constraints and they tend to travel by bus and train. 

Since 9/11, airport processes have become increasingly draconian. TSA and security checks and limits on what you can pack to prevent hidden explosives or similar from being smuggled onboard have made flying a nightmare that people complain bitterly about while we seem to largely accept that we just have to put up with it.

I don't yet have a clear idea of what I am doing here. I'm currently researching that.

I'm not sure I want to include air travel and I'm trying to figure out how to relate to touristy stuff like cruises.

I don't typically do normal vacations. I did day trips on weekends to see touristy stuff as a military wife who moved every few years and stopped at Mount Rushmore while crossing the country for reasons related to my husband's military career.

We did that on our way to Georgia and while in Georgia for a few months, I went with family to see Stone Mountain for the first time, so it sticks in my mind that Stone Mountain was the defacto "resume" for the guy hired to carve Mount Rushmore.

I've had a full and interesting life in many ways but I don't live like other people. I've been on one cruise and I lived like a perpetual tourist mostly without doing your usual vacation type stuff.

So I am having enormous difficulty imagining anyone can relate to how I like to travel. And I'm a handicapped person whose life is online because of my physical limitations.

So basically I can maybe BLOG about this, maybe write some code to add some search functions or something, but in my mind "real businesses" probably involve doing stuff in the physical world I simply can't do -- even if they are basically a website, like Rome2Rio.

I don't know a lot of code. I do know a little. And I do know you learn to code if you have a project you want to develop.

Footnote 

In my old age, I've become terrible with names. My interest in Native stuff is showing. I searched "monument defacing the Black Hills" to get the name Mount Rushmore.