Travel by Greyhound has consistently provided me some of the most unique experiences of a lifetime. My catalog of bizarre bus trips is long and varied, and I don't think I've ever had a two-way journey in which at least one of the legs wasn't overly complicated and odd.

Yesterday was no exception. It began when my sisters and I arrived at the bus terminal in Rochester, NY, for my journey to Toronto. An SUV marked US Border Patrol was parked outside the station, and as we sat inside waiting, two border control officers walked in, resplendent in army green suits and intimidating sunglasses. When the time came to board the bus, I was one of the last because of saying goodbye to my sisters. When I finally tried to board, a Border Patrol officer was blocking the aisle. "You'll have to wait," he barked, and when I said "OK" and stepped back, he clarified: "No, outside."

I disembarked and joined a group consisting of the jocular driver, a baggage handler, and a smoking black-clad Goth girl with a Jersey accent and shaved and tattooed eyebrows that arched in a bold blue swoop across her forehead. As we waited, one of the border patrol officers escorted a dreadlocked guy off the bus and made him retrieve his baggage: for whatever reason, he wasn't going to be allowed to continue his journey.

Finally, the border patrol stepped off the bus and allowed the Goth and me to board, simply asking if we were US citizens. We ended up in the same seat at the very back of the bus and began chatting. But the border patrol weren't finished: as we watched, one of them walked up to a man a few seats in front of us and said: "You're under arrest. You claim to be a student at the University of Missouri, but our records show you were never there." There was a clink of handcuffs, and the unfortunate man was escorted off the bus.

Finally the bus got under way. The Goth girl, in the course of our conversation, told me that the dreadlocked man who had been removed was drinking and had tried hitting on her. She and I had a long and pleasant, if somewhat unusual conversation until she got off at Buffalo, at which point I put my earphones in and switched on my MP3 player for a bit of welcome introvert time.

The border crossing into Canada is only about ten or fifteen minutes from Buffalo. The usual procedure is that the driver gets off the bus and the passengers wait until he gets the all-clear, at which point they disembark, claim their checked baggage from the side of the bus, and file through customs and immigration. I was one of the last off the bus, and found only one of my two pieces of luggage. The other was nowhere in sight.

The driver, a large and imposing man, was standing nearby, so I said, "I had another bag." At this point, a man came along and said, "Excuse me, you have my suitcase," and took the one that I was holding. "Oh," I said confusedly, "it looked like mine." I then turned to the driver and said, "I had two pieces of baggage, but they're not here."

He gestured angrily to a woman and her son whom I'd seen him speaking to a moment before. "You're in the same boat as them," he said in a thick Dutch accent. "You vere supposed to get off and claim your luggage in Buffalo. You didn't, so it's still in Buffalo. They made an announcement, didn't you hear it?"

I hadn't, and stood there helplessly. The other woman, a thin and stooped Trinidadian Indian lady, and her 20-something son, stood there just as helplessly. They hadn't heard it either. "So what can we do?" I asked.

"I'm calling Buffalo," he said irritatedly. "I'll ask dem if dey can put the luggage on the 6:10 bus. You'll have to vait here for it. Can you do that?"

We agreed that we could, so he stalked around with his tiny cellphone to his giant ear, making angry phone calls to and from Buffalo, till it was arranged. We were to clear immigration and wait for the next bus, at which point we could claim our luggage and continue on.

So we did. We passed through immigration without a hitch and were gestured to a small and uncomfortable bench where we sat waiting. The Indian lady was thin and stooped over and had a terrible cold. She perpetually coughed, blew her nose into a napkin, and muttered complaining things to me and her son, many of which I didn't understand. I simply responded soothingly to the ones that I did. The son was a shy and silent person, who sat in misery with his hood pulled over his head and his face buried in the one piece of luggage they had. They'd been on the bus since 7:00am in New York City.

The angry Dutch driver came over for one parting shot at us before he left. "Ve are driver, not customer service," he barked, leaning his considerable behind on a desk and folding his arms. "How come you not realize you had to check your luggage on Buffalo? Didn't you think something ven half de bus vas getting off?" He left with a description of the bus and the driver which were coming, and then we were alone with the quiet building. Our only diversion was watching immigration officers go to and fro and scan some Chinese family's shrink-wrapped luggage, and finding out that no, there wasn't a washroom we could use.

Finally, an hour and a half later, our bus arrived. All of our luggage was on it, and we boarded without a hitch. However, at that point, the bus simply sat. And waited. And waited. We found out the reason for the delay when an aggrieved male voice belonging to a person boarding said loudly, "It was because I got some money on me and they wanted to know how I got it!" He'd been pulled out for an interview, but finally, the bus was on its way.

We crawled out of the border region and Niagara Falls, and were on our way to Toronto, rumbling along the Gardiner Expressway. I was anticipating our arrival when suddenly the bus pulled over to the side of the road. The engine cut and the bus went dark.

We sat there in the darkness and the silence for a while, until word spread that the bus had broken down. Another bus was coming along, and we would be transferred to that.

At this point, there was nothing to do but laugh. I'd been getting more and more amused by the comedy of errors that this trip had become, and this was the final straw. We sat in the darkness and cold until finally the other bus arrived, our luggage was transferred, and we filed along the narrow space between our bus and the barrier at the side of the road into the second one. That bus, I'm thankful to say, made it to Toronto without any more undue delays or bizarre happenings, and I arrived only two and a quarter hours after I was supposed to. Which is better than some journeys I could tell you about.

If you want a strange and inconvenient travel experience, full of unexpected adventures, I'd recommend the bus. They don't tell you that in the advertisements, of course. It's amusing. It can occasionally be very aggravating. And it makes for some great stories, if you can handle it.