Revisiting the American road trip: It's the bus. What did you expect?

Dustin, 26, sports tattoos of his daughters' names, one on each forearm. He lives in Cosi, in the house he grew up in that he bought from his mom. "What's Cosi?" I asked him. "Oh, that's Cosmopolis," he said, a town of about 1,600, just south of Aberdeen, Wash. He was riding buses home from visiting family in Seattle, having parked his car when gas reached $3 a gallon.

People ride rural buses for work trips, to get to school, to run errands, just like in the city — though if there's only one daily bus each way, an errand can last all day.

What will it take?

Travel along the Northwest coast was possible and enjoyable for me — and may be more so for others if the transit systems in Tillamook, Lincoln, and Lane counties successfully seek collaborative grants to close the gaps in Oregon.

Getting around in one spot can be more of a challenge, though doable with a only a little planning. In Tillamook, bus route No. 1 leaves the courthouse every hour and covers a lot of ground on its 45-minute loop, stopping near the post office, the hospital, the library, grocery stores, even the cheese factory on the outskirts of town.

But in most rural areas there's no Sunday service, sometimes no service all weekend, and the last trip of the day can be in the early evening. Getting inland from coastal towns can be inconvenient, if not impossible.

"The buses suck," Nena from Green Acres, Ore., told me over a campfire at Oregon's Washburne Memorial State Park. She and her husband Greg were vacationing in their 35-foot fifth wheel towed by a Ford F-250, with a beetle VW on the side.

Would she take a bus if it were available? "Yes! With gas prices ... but I don't want to wait three hours. Where we are there's nothing, no way to get to town [Coos Bay, 10 miles away]. When our kids turned 16, got jobs, we had to buy them cars." American driving is "ruining the universe," she commented. I tried not to look over at their rig.

I'd find out later that a bus does pass Green Acres on the way to Coos Bay, though likely not when Nena would want it — just once in the morning and once on the way back, midafternoon.

Another group of RVers in their 50s and 60s — three couples, each with their own trailer — were flexible, philosophical even, about their mode of travel. "If this trip hadn't been planned, we wouldn't have gone," Larry told me. He and his wife Bridget had the only diesel RV of the bunch. John, from Modesto, Calif., chimed in. "If gas keeps going up, we'll just drive less." This would be a good thing, he said. People will walk more, ride bikes, take the bus. The air will be cleaner.

Perhaps. Driving habits seem to be changing, and one hopes that rural transit systems can handle increased ridership as their budgets are squeezed by the same fuel prices that have people opting for the bus.

"I've been [with this agency] for 20 years," Cynda Bruce of Oregon's Lincoln County Transit told me. "We started out as a little, senior and disabled program." Now the system provides 250,000 rides a year in a county of only 44,500 residents.

And though the Coastal Express segment linking Brookings, Ore., to Smith River, Calif., is not widely used, Kathy Bernhardt of Curry Public Transit said the agency is committed to maintaining the coast link. "That's great!" she said of my Washington to California trip. "We're hoping to attract more [people] traveling through."

The buses are there, for now. So are the sights and the people. Anyone up for a road trip?

Part 1: You can (almost) get there from here.