There is a bus ticket that will take you all the way from New York to Los Angeles in one go.
One ride, roughly 3,000 miles, taking several days, with no hotel break and nowhere to hide if things go wrong. Reviews of the route have become infamous, with people saying they ‘wouldn't wish this trip on their worst enemy’, citing delays, lost luggage, no sleep, and dangerous interactions.”
Long-haul buses already test people’s patience at the best of times. This is the nightmare version: with multiple state lines, tight connections, random night-time stops at freezing service stations and the constant risk that one small delay wrecks your entire route. Most sane travellers treat it as a warning.
YouTuber Ryan Trahan, known for unique and sometimes wild travel videos, looked at that and saw a challenge. Armed with a camera and ‘the cheapest available seat on this bus’, he decided to ride the full route and see whether the horror stories stacked up — whilst also attempting what he calls the ‘oceanic exchange’. Before leaving New York, he filled a takeaway cup with Atlantic seawater and set himself a mission: carry it, lid off, across the country and pour it into the Pacific.
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Almost immediately, the video showcasing the trip starts to go the way the reviews warned. The first leg from New York City to St Louis is meant to be 22 hours, but a technical fault leaves everyone stuck for ‘five hours later at the bus station’ waiting for a replacement coach, grabbing their bags from one vehicle and hauling them onto another. At one point, he comes out of the toilet to find ‘police were literally on the bus’. He added: “I heard somebody got arrested”.
On paper, Trahan had a strict ‘sleep plan’ to avoid missing a crucial early-morning transfer in St Louis. In reality, a flat tyre in the middle of the night creates yet another delay. A fellow passenger, Mike, sums up the mood when asked if he’d ever do it again: “Absolutely not. You couldn't get me on this if you had a pistol to my head.”
By the time they finally roll into St Louis, the original connection is long gone. The YouTuber queues at the desk and gets re-routed completely, now going via Denver and Las Vegas instead of Phoenix. Mike decides he’s done and heads home: “I’m tapping out. I’m turning around and going home. I can't take anymore.”
From there, the ride turns into a kind of rolling social experiment. He spends nights half-awake in cramped seats, hunts for eye masks in 2am travel stops, and watches as stranded passengers from a ‘broken’ bus in Utah get folded into their overcrowded service. He admits: “We are 4 days into this trip and I've officially lost the entire concept of a sleeping schedule.”
Even the oceanic exchange barely survives. The cup, nicknamed Chuck, is knocked over more than once, leaving, as Trahan put it: “an extremely small amount of water remaining in this cup.” Somehow, though, both creator and Chuck the cup make it to Los Angeles, and finally to the beach, where he empties what’s left into the Pacific: “Well, the oceanic exchange is complete.”
Despite the hiccups, Trahan wraps up the video fondly, explaining: “As the saying goes, it is not about the destination. It is truly about the journey and the people on it with you.” With how terrible the ‘journey’ part of the trip, the people were indeed the saving grace of Trahan’s journey, but the sentiment is still sweet all the same.