Tourists line up at bus station

Jeffrey Libby

Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001 | 10:18 a.m.

Angela Panameno, 35, sat on her luggage with her 9-year-old son in a spot out of the wind. Her husband, a cook, was in line for tickets back home to San Francisco.

"All I want to be is home," she said.

Panameno was among other tourists and business travelers Wednesday who found themselves in line at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Las Vegas.

Most rental cars were long gone. McCarran International Airport had been grounded for a second day following the terror strikes in New York City and Washington, D.C.

So people waited in long lines for one of the last ways out of town -- a Greyhound bus.

Taxicabs at times were stacked two rows deep in front of the Main Street bus station. Taxi drivers walked the line, hawking destinations of Los Angeles, San Jose and Phoenix. Prices were from $300 to $600. The fare by limousine to points Midwest and beyond was said to top $3,000.

People in line had watched on TV for close to two days the repeated destruction of the World Trade Center towers and a portion of the Pentagon. Many by Wednesday were ready to go home.

They were tired of Las Vegas. They wanted to contemplate the national tragedy with their friends and families. They said they were worried about an economic slowdown and continued terrorism. They talked of the nation preparing for war.

Across from the bus station, at the lobby of Little Annie's Nevada Hotel and Casino, business for the $33-a-night rooms was up about 15 percent. "J.D.", security manager of Little Annie's, did not want to give his full name, but he said the people lined up around both sides of the station looked out of place in their low-slung heels, straw hats and wheeled baggage. Normally the neighborhood is populated by pimps, prostitutes and street-corner drug dealers, he said.

"Usually it's the losers, the lost, and the ones that want to gamble but lost all their money in line for the bus," J.D. said. "The cops are out there two to three times a day breaking up fights. But that's the upper elite, so to speak. It's very unusual."

"The cops are out there two to three times a day breaking up fights," he said. "But that's the upper elite, so to speak. It's very unusual."

Steve Mueller, from Seattle, was one of them. He hadn't taken a bus since 1981, he said, when he headed for a friend's Oregon wedding. He had flown into town Monday for a business conference but "never really got anything concrete accomplished."

Instead, he stayed in his room at the Four Seasons. Mueller, 46, Wednesday morning decided he had sat around enough. He wanted to see his wife and three kids, he said, "To be with them and try to understand what happened, to start going forward again."

Steven Emerson, an auditor from Madison, Wis., and his wife, Laura, a financial adviser, also skipped plane tickets to get home. Their flight was supposed to have left Tuesday morning, just more than an hour after the first plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

After a 30-hour bus ride, they expect to answer many questions for financial clients concerned by a slumping economic market made more fragile by the attack. But the nation's needs were first in Laura Emerson's mind.

"We have a situation now as Americans and we have to do something about it. We can't sit around and let it happen again," she said. "It will have to be some sort of military action. And it will be some sort of retaliation I would hope."