Amanda and I had seats on Bus One.
It was leaving the Lower East Side at 6 a.m. for the Women's March in Washington. We were going with friends, and the plan was to spend the day supporting women's rights and get back to New York that night.
The preparation emails read like a field manual. Save the bus information. Print the maps because phones might not work in the crowd. Keep the legal-aid number. Know the captain and co-captain. The updates were long, specific, and increasingly urgent as the day got closer.
That was reasonable. The crowd in Washington was enormous.
The streets were packed with people and homemade signs. Amanda stopped to look over a field of signs while we moved through the march with our friends.
Getting there worked. Getting back got complicated.
The Metro had a massive delay that evening. Our group was stuck on board while the bus organizers were trying to account for everybody and leave Washington. I replied to the bus thread with the four people in our group and asked somebody to send the bus details directly to me.
Another rider finally got onto a new train. We gave up on waiting and put four people in a car headed toward the bus.
“Will arrive at 7:30,” I wrote.
The march was the reason for the trip. The last hour became a small logistics problem: get Amanda and our friends out of the Metro, find Bus One, and make sure nobody left without us.
We found it.