By Francesca Street, CNN
(CNN) — Peering out the Greyhound bus window, Diann Droste saw the snow coming down fast and thick.
“I remember I was looking out the window and thinking, ‘I don’t know that this is good,’” Diann tells CNN Travel today. “I started to see cars in the ditches, and then I saw semis in the ditches. But I’m 16. And I don’t know what happens in a situation like that, so I just read my book.”
It was January 1973. Diann was a high school junior living in Waterloo, Iowa. She was on her way home from visiting her pen pal, who lived in Brainerd, Minnesota — “the real northern part of Minnesota, where it’s really cold.” The bus ride took more than 10 hours.
“Those Greyhounds make a lot of stops. There was one transfer where I got off the first bus and got on a second,” recalls Diann today. “My children think it’s unusual that I was riding Greyhound buses around the country when I was 16. But we didn’t have money for airplanes.”
Diann describes herself as “pretty fearless,” back then. Or maybe she was just “a teenager at a different time.” Either way, riding a Greyhound bus alone didn’t intimidate her — until the snow started. As the view out of the window disappeared into white, Diann tried to focus on the book in her lap.
“Snow is nothing unusual in the Midwest in January. But very soon, it was snowing hard and the bus was sliding,” she recalls.
The mood on the bus seemed to shift as well.
“I remember thinking these other people on this bus — and the bus was just about completely full — seem a little nervous,” says Diann.
Unexpected detour
There was a collective sense of relief when the bus arrived in the city of Albert Lea, Minnesota. The bus driver exited the interstate and parked outside a Holiday Inn.
“He stopped the bus and said, ‘We can’t go any farther. It’s not safe for me to drive, so we’re going to spend the night here,’” Diann recalls.
For Diann, panic set in immediately.
“Instantly, I thought, ‘Uh oh.’…I had no idea buses stopped like that.”
Diann didn’t have any money. That’s one part of this story her kids still can’t believe. She’d brought about $25 for the trip, and now, on the return leg, she only had a few dollars left.
She got off the bus, pulled her coat tight around her neck and looked at the other passengers. Everyone else headed straight into the motel. Everyone else also seemed much older — people who instinctively knew what to do when travel plans fell apart.
Diann spotted a pay phone and used a few of her remaining coins to call home. She told her mother what had happened but tried not to alarm her.
“When I told my kids this, I said, ‘Now, if that ever happens to you, call me. I have a credit card.’” Diann says. “But in 1972, ‘73 no one had a cell phone, not everybody had a credit card.”
Her mom didn’t have one. Albert Lea was still two hours from Waterloo, and the weather conditions were too dangerous for her mother to drive to pick her up.
“It was snowing in Iowa also and they were expecting up to a foot of snow overnight,” Diann recalls.
When she hung up, she feared she might be stranded for days.
Inside the Holiday Inn, Diann sat down in a chair in the hotel lobby, under the fluorescent lights. She watched as the other passengers lined up at the front desk, and got rooms.
“No one seemed to even notice me,” she says. “And they all got their rooms and left, and I was sitting in the chair.”
There were no families among the group. No young people — just what Diann thought of as “real adults.” And she was alone and unsure what to do.
“I can’t get a room, because I don’t have any money,” she told herself. She tried to stay calm and formulate a plan. She spotted a sign behind the desk advertising free breakfast.