Road Trip by Bus?

With the rise in public transportation use, it makes sense to me to take a look into what kinds of vacations one might be able to take by taking the bus, instead of their car, out for a road trip.

The bus can help you with getting the most for your dollar, and provides travelers with the bonus of not having to do the driving, but it does remove the ability to be as spontaneous as most road trips are.

I took a road trip with my nephew one year where we left the house planning to drive about 50 miles to some caves, we ended up missing a turn and going halfway across the state. Then, instead of turning back, we decided on the spur of the moment to head off in another direction and drove a few hundred more miles out of the way just... just because.

For me, that is road tripping.

It is also something that costs over $4.00 a gallon to do now, so is starting to become a luxury instead of a spontaneous act. Could one achieve the same spontaneous fun when traveling by bus? I'm sure that you could get some great vacation deals if you were to sit down with a bus route map and plan out your trip by bus ahead of time, but what about just getting on a bus and taking it... wherever. If you decide that you don't like where that bus is heading, get on a different bus and see where it takes you. This is much easier on city buses where you can get a day pass for riding the bus as many times as you want, just hop bus to bus and see the sights of your city.

Taking a road trip by bus would be less spontaneous on longer cross country road trips, particularly when you would be buying tickets that go destination to destination, but I'm sure that it could be done. And probably a lot cheaper than someone could drive their car on a similar road trip. I'll leave the actual experimentation on that to others, however, since I am too remotely located to be messing with such stuff.