Whats it like to take Greyhound cross-country? Two students found out.

Flying from Boston to Seattle takes about six hours. Taking a Greyhound bus might require more than 100, with nights spent sitting on curbs at desolate rest stops, meals at McDonalds and very little sleep.

For travel blogger Miles Taylor, 22, and his friend Aleena Parenti, 18, it sounded like a fun way to spend part of a summer off from college.

Transportation has been Taylor’s passion for years. After launching a transit blog at 13, he reviewed every rail and bus station in the Boston area by the time he graduated high school. Now studying urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he expanded with a YouTube channel, taking on feats like riding the entire Bay Area Rapid Transit system in six hours. SFGate dubbed him a “transit guru” for his goal to ride every mile of public transit in the United States. This month’s trip was not even his first experience taking Greyhound across the country.

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This time, he recruited Parenti, a fellow Penn student, to join him in Pittsburgh for the four-day journey to Seattle. They documented the journey in a Twitter thread, drawing thousands of fans, some of whom even met them at Greyhound stations with food.

IT BEGINS! I'm about to embark on a Greyhound trip across the US from Boston to Seattle.

3700+ miles. 16 states. 6 transfers. 70 hours - if we're lucky.

This is going to be interesting. pic.twitter.com/NP5FHPigQC

Greyhound, which serves about 16 million passengers a year, can be a lifeline for some undocumented immigrants, homeless people and rural Americans, but is often maligned for its on-time performance and station infrastructure.

Greyhound spokesperson Crystal Booker said in a statement that the company appreciated Taylor’s insights and that the company works to help customers reach their destinations “as safely and as efficiently as possible.”

Like airlines, Booker said, the company is grappling with an “industry-wide driver shortage” that has impacted service in some areas, and that its stations range from full terminal buildings to roadside gas stations “to help ensure that even less populated communities still have necessary access to intercity transportation.”

Shortly after their arrival in Seattle — 28 hours late — Taylor and Parenti talked about seeing the country by road, the service on Greyhound, and the future of bus travel in the United States.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

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Q: Why did you decide to take the trip?

Taylor: Greyhound up until the day before we left had a rewards program that was really exploitable, because for every trip you took, you could get one point or up to three points depending on what type of ticket you bought. And when you got 16 points, they gave you a free round trip anywhere in the country. I already had a free trip, so I was like, well, I want to go to the West Coast.

Parenti: So I just bought a bunch of Greyhound tickets and we rode them between Philly and New Jersey and racked up enough points for me to get a free ticket, at a way cheaper cost than actually buying the ticket.

Q: How are you feeling now that it’s complete?

Taylor: There’s a serious accomplishment feeling whenever you go anywhere by overland transit instead of flying. Whether it’s driving, Amtrak, or Greyhound, you end up somewhere, it’s like, I accomplished this. We’re on vacation in Seattle — we’ve been doing fun touristy things, but the journey was part of the fun.

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Q: What was the most challenging part?

Taylor: Getting stuck in Indianapolis was probably the lowest point because they locked Aleena’s stuff on a bus and yelled at us for trying to get it. No one really knew what was going on. My other low point was when we had to take the Salt Lake Express from Salt Lake City to Boise. The seats were uniquely uncomfortable, and they opened up the roof hatch because there was no A/C on the bus. But then it got down to 57 degrees, and it was so cold. That was an overnight trip, and I got no sleep.

Q: How much sleep would you say you got during the trip?

Taylor: Maybe like 20 hours [over four nights].

Q: What did you do for food?

Parenti: Before I left, I packed a whole bag of snacks because our original itinerary did not have food stops. Most of our stops were like 20 minutes, so I packed a lot of PB&J sandwiches and crackers and snacks. But this route we ended up taking had a lot of good food stuff.

“I feel like any aspiring presidential candidate should ride Greyhound for at least a day.”

When we were in cities, we went to actual restaurants — we usually got takeout. In Burlington, Iowa, we went to this breakfast buffet.

Taylor: We had a couple instances where people who were following our Twitter would would come to a station and give us food. In Indianapolis, we had some folks give us barbecue, and then in Boise, a couple gave us fritters for breakfast. That was absolutely incredible.

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Q: You said in your thread that Greyhound changed your itinerary twice mid-trip. What happened?

Parenti: Our first was up through Chicago and then Minneapolis, and then over through Montana. Then in Pittsburgh, it got changed to going down to L.A. and then up. I’m glad we didn’t do that — that would have taken forever. In St. Louis, our route changed again and we went up to Iowa, over, and then up through Idaho and Oregon to Seattle.

Taylor: We ended up arriving 28 hours after we were supposed to. But we were totally expecting this to happen, and we didn’t have anything planned for the first day in Seattle.

Q: What should people considering a long-haul bus ride know?

Taylor: Bring snacks. But also, take advantage of the stops that you have. The cool thing about Greyhound over Amtrak is that you’ll get like hour- to two-hour-long stops in various places. For example, we knew leaving Des Moines, we’re going to get this much time in Omaha. We found a restaurant, scheduled a takeout, and then we just walked there and got some real food.

Parenti: My high point of the trip was going to St. Louis. We were stuck there from like 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. We went to the St. Louis Arch at sunrise. Just like, what do you do during those hours in St. Louis — you just find something.

Q: I know you’ve done this before, Miles, but what do you both feel like you learned about the country from seeing it by bus?

Taylor: I feel like any aspiring presidential candidate should ride Greyhound for at least a day because you’re just getting exposed to people you wouldn’t otherwise see. They’re people who deserve a voice because Greyhound doesn’t treat them very well, and they’re trying to get somewhere.

Q: Coming out of this, do you feel the United States should invest more in bus travel, or should more money go toward airports or high-speed rail?

Taylor: In an ideal world, the train network would be a lot more robust, and you would have buses acting as a feeder to the trains. You would take a bus from a small town to a train station, and it would time with the train.Given the current attitude towards trains and transit in general, I think the best bet is just to invest in more buses; that seems to be as far as people are willing to spend right now.

You have to remember that Greyhound is a private company that just happens to have a monopoly over bus travel in the U.S., and because of that, they can treat people however they want. Nationalizing Greyhound will allow more money to be put into it to improve the service quality a little bit, like invest in new stations.

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Q: Miles, you were known in Boston as the teen who reviewed every T station. Have you graduated to bigger things now? What’s next?

Taylor: I’m graduating school in December and then ideally getting a job at a transit agency somewhere. The big change was during covid. I started making video content, which lends itself to bigger adventures.

As far as things I want to do, I have one more free Greyhound ticket. I pretty much just started on trying to visit the least used Amtrak station in each state. Later this summer, my friend and I are going to try to ride every mile of trolley bus in the U.S. — buses that run on wires, basically. They run in five U.S. cities and we’re going to take Amtrak around the U.S. to attempt to ride every mile of them. And Boston is doing a bus network redesign, so if I end up in Boston, I’ll probably end up wanting to review all the routes again.

I love video editing and making people laugh. I’ve had people come up to me and say I got into transit because of you, and that makes me really happy because it’s something that more people should be interested in. Ultimately, with climate change, public transit is the future.

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