As anyone who has read my story the Overnight Bus knows, I hate overnight buses. I can never sleep, and I end up missing a day anyway because I’m too exhausted when I arrive in the morning to do anything worthwhile. As always, when I arrive in a town, I check the departure schedule for my next destination. Having forgotten to do this when I first started traveling, I would end up frustrated at my hotel trying to find information online the day before my departure. Now I get all the information, like price, schedule and routes, as soon as I arrive so I don’t waste a trip coming back to the bus terminal, which is not always located conveniently. Sometimes I’ll even buy my departure ticket in advance to make sure I have a seat.

I arrived in Vizcaino, and immediately inquired about busses to my next destination. The clerk informed me that it would take 12 hours to get to La Paz. Since there were only four departures a day, and the earliest bus left at noon, that put me in La Paz around midnight, assuming the early bus was on time. The rest of the buses involved an overnight trip or arriving at some obscene hour in the morning. I prefer not to arrive in an unfamiliar town after dark, and the hotel at which I had made reservations indicated their reception closed at 8pm. They had offered to keep a staff member there until I arrived, but I didn’t want someone to have to wait up for me since there was a good chance the bus would run late.

I was beginning to consider the overnight trip when an idea came to me. Upon studying the route map for the bus, I saw that there were several stops on the way to La Paz. I asked the woman at the counter the number of hours to a few of those stops and began my calculations. If I caught the noon bus from Vizcaino, I would arrive in a place called Ciudad Constitución around 7pm. The last bus leaving from Vizcaino later that day would arrive in Ciudad Constitución at 7:15am the following morning. That meant I could arrive in Ciudad Constitución before sunset, get a full night’s sleep, and catch the morning bus on to La Paz. This also broke up a marathon bus ride into two shorter segments.

I’d found my solution to the overnight bus problem, and as it turned out, Ciudad Constitucion wasn’t too bad a place to spend 12 hours. It had several restaurants, at least five coffee shops, two banks, sidewalks, a tree filled median, and even handicap ramps. At that point, it was the most well apportioned city I’d visited in Baja.

There were only five of us on the morning bus which made for a quiet trip, and at 10:15am, the bus pulled into La Paz. I grabbed my bag, exited the terminal and strolled along the waterfront feeling refreshed and ready to make the most of the day.