Hundreds of New Yorkers who were hoping to hit the "Rally to Restore Sanity" were met with insanity at the Port Authority bus terminal and never made it to Washington.
Greyhound oversold tickets for the non-stop DC bus, forcing many riders on to other bus lines - many of which didn't make it to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert mega-event on time Saturday.
"By the time we got to the National Mall it was all but over," said Jennifer Cordery, 28, of Park Slope, Brooklyn. "We found ourselves taking pictures of empty seats to prove we were there."
Greyhound conceded they may have underestimated the number of buses they needed.
"We tried to project the number of passengers we were going to have, but there was tremendous demand," spokeswoman Bonnie Bastian said.
A spokesman for Peter Pan bus lines, which took many of the overflow riders, said the demand Saturday rivaled President Obama's inauguration and the heavilly-traveled holiday weekends.
"It's my understanding this was bigger than Thanksgiving," said the spokesman, Bob Schwarz, whose company ran 76 buses to Washington that morning.
Cordery said her futile trip began when she and boyfriend Jason Jasso arrived at the terminal at 6:20 a.m. Saturday with tickets for the 7 a.m. bus and found it mobbed.
"They oversold the bus by hundreds of tickets and weren't prepared to handle the overflow," she said.
Cordery said she and Jasso joined the "massive line of frustrated rally-goers" weaving through the bus depot for 2 1/2 hours.
"We were finally ushered on to a Peter Ban bus at 9:15 a.m.," she said.
There were at least a dozen other riders on the bus who had been bumped off Greyhound, Cordery said, and it wasn't until the Peter Pan bus was pulling into the Lincoln Tunnel they realized they weren't on a non-stop.
"We told the bus driver we're on the wrong bus and he said, 'No you're not' and wouldn't let us off," she said. "We were kind of held captive on a five hour bus ride."
Cordery said rather than ride all the way to Washington, they got off at Silver Spring, Md., and took the metro to the Mall - and disappointment.
"The loudest voices lately seem to be of willful ignorance, so it was important for me to be at the rally," Cordery said. "I really wanted to be a part of it."
Fearing another five hour bus ride back, Cordery said "we shelled out $300 to take the train back instead."
Organizers estimate well over 250,000 people attended the rally, which was meant to be an antidote to Glenn Beck's right wing "Restoring Honor" rally two months ago.
In another indicator of how well-attended the rally was, the Washington Metro announced they set a new record for Saturday ridership with 825,437 trips taken --- mostly people travelling to see Stewart and Colbert do their thing.
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