Unfiltered Story #105498

One year, me and my friends decide to go to an anime convention for the new year in Austin. We ended up booking tickets with a cheap bus company, and would soon grow to regret it. Though there was a bus station from our home city, arriving in Austin would present us with the company’s ‘station’ there; Namely a completely empty lot, several miles away from our hotel. It wasn’t so bad, except the walk convinced us to call a taxi for when we decided to return.

The day that the convention ended, and that we were supposed to take the bus home, we checked out of our hotel and began to enjoy the last day. A few hours before our bus was supposed to leave, I call a taxi to arrive at our hotel at a specific time. Nothing seems out of the ordinary…until the taxi arrives well over an hour before it was supposed to.

Not wanting to be standing in an empty lot, in the middle of Austin, I asked the taxi to come back in an hour. An hour passes… and the taxi never returned. It becomes a mad dash to find another way there, especially now that it was too late to call another taxi. We managed to find one of our friends from our hometown, who had driven and, therefore, had a car available. They drove us to the lot where the bus was supposed to be, with a good 5-10 minutes to spare, only to find that the bus HAD ALREADY LEFT.

Me and my friends were now stranded in Austin, with no hotel room, and the soonest bus from another company leaving early the next morning. (At this point it was only ten at night.) Two of the four of us decided to camp out at the bus station (an actual station), in order to catch the earliest possible bus. The friend who had given us a ride offered to let us stay in their room for the night, since they weren’t going to check out until the next day, and would drive us to the station in the morning.

Thankfully we were able to get home safely, without any other incidents. But that cheap bus company has most certainly made it where I’m never going to use it again!