I don't love buses. No one loves buses. No one romanticises buses the way they do trains. No one fantasises about a bus trip the way they do with air travel.
And why would you? There's nothing grand or exciting about travelling in a bus. It's just an oversized car, an Earth-bound metal tube full of the world's great unwashed, an uncomfortable, sometimes smelly rectangle that has no discernable advantages: it can't fly, it has to stop constantly, it gets stuck in traffic, and it has to have breaks at the dodgiest service stations known to man. A bus trip is the sort of thing you're forced into rather than something you do by choice. Pretty much none of the world's classic journeys are done by bus. It's no wonder we don't love them.
And yet I'm here to tell you that buses really aren't that bad. There's actually plenty to enjoy about these hulking pieces of steel on wheels. But you have to look a little deeper to appreciate it.
I'm not going to say they're romantic. I'm not going to say you'll dream of one day taking your partner on a bus trip for your honeymoon. I'm not going to claim that "take the Megabus from London to Edinburgh because I forgot to pre-book train tickets and it's going to cost more than 100 pounds each" should appear on your bucket list.
However, consider the Americas, the spiritual home of the great road trip. Bus journeys there tend to get better and more interesting the further south you go.
Begin in the USA and you've got interminable Greyhound trips with some very dodgy travellers. Go down into Mexico and Guatemala, however, and all of a sudden you're travelling on very colourful buses with very colourful characters. Things are getting better.
Continue on to Colombia and you're riding the transport of the people, rattling across mountains and plains in anything ranging from an old school bus to something that's fancier than an aeroplane. Go on to Argentina and Chile and you're in business class, living a life of luxury with flat-bed seats and waiter service onboard.
This is the full gamut of the bus experience, and any fan of this mode of transport will tell you that the Americas is the place to do it. Bus travel there is all about climbing through the Andean foothills between Lima and Cusco. It's burning across the Altiplano in Bolivia. It's winding through coastal roads in Brazil. If you want to love buses, you need to travel on one in the Americas.
Even outside of those fine lands, however, you can still find something to recommend the humble bus.
Example one: a London double-decker. Score that elusive front seat at the top of the big red bus and strap yourself in (or, rather, don't) for the best tour of the city you could have. And all for a few quid.
In fact that's one of bus travel's big advantages: it's cheap. Throughout Europe you can jump on an intercity bus for far less that you'd have to pay on a train, or even a budget airline. You can travel on those speedy highways without having to worry about foreign road rules or interpreting street signs.
You'll also find, throughout the world, that you tend to meet more people when you travel by bus. There might not be a dining car like there is on a train, but instead you have servo stops for coffee and questionable snacks, the pain of the bus experience bonding people together in a way that can't be replicated on other forms of transport.
In cities, you're seeing life the way it's lived by the residents, discovering that, in Canada, strangers tend to strike up a conversation with the person they're sitting next to, whereas in England everyone keeps to themselves; in Australia everyone says "thanks mate" to the driver; in India they just breathe deep and squeeze up as a ridiculous number of people attempt to cram their way in.
You're travelling in the slow lane on a bus. You're taking time to check out the countryside. You're staring out the window at pedestrians. You're taking everything in, sometimes in the desperate search for a recognisable landmark so you can figure out when you need to get off – but sometimes just for the fun of it.
Bus travel will never be able to compete with the romance of being on a train. It will never give you the freedom of your own car. It will never provide the thrill of a motorbike, and it will never have the speed or convenience of an aeroplane.
It will never be something we love. But we could at least spare it a little appreciation.
See also: The world's most spectacular local transport
