Every school day for eight years, Denny’s Bus Lines driver Dan Pally has covered roughly the same 100 kilometres of rural road north of Highway 6, picking up students around Fergus and bringing them home again. This fall, that route turned out to be part of the story behind his newly published travel memoir, The Absolute in a Spoonful, which travels through fifteen countries and years of memory — a surprising number of them, Dan says, first taking shape somewhere along Bus Run 451.
Eight Years on Bus Run 451Â
Dan transferred to Denny’s Bus Lines about eight years ago, when the local contract changed hands in Fergus. He still remembers the HR manager telling him, “I think you’re going to like it. It’s a family business” — a line that turned out to mean more than he expected. He’s driven Bus Run 451 ever since, alongside charters that have taken him to University of Guelph agricultural and research facilities, and on school trips to Toronto and student camps. “Driving a bus,” he says, “gives you a rather unique window onto the community around you.”
A Memoir Born at the TableÂ
The book began almost by accident, after Dan walked the Camino from Porto to Santiago de Compostela and later returned to Portugal to retrace it in his own way. Writing about those trips, he noticed every story seemed to end up at a table. “I was travelling through memory, with food as my guide,” he says — cooking a dish again at home could bring back a street, a conversation, a person, years later. He wrote partly with the Bus 451 students in mind, hoping the book might make them curious enough to see travel “not simply as tourists, but as part of their education.”
Where the Ideas Came FromÂ
Dan is careful not to overstate it, but the rural roads around Fergus have a way of opening doors to memory — the woods, the farms, the quiet rhythm of a 100-kilometre day. “I may see something along a road and suddenly remember a place, a person, or something from my own past,” he says. “Later, when I sit down to write, I realize the first thread of an idea may have appeared somewhere along a country road north of Fergus.” When the book was published, he thanked the route and the company in its Acknowledgments:
“Thank you for creating a workplace where professionalism and kindness naturally coexist. Your flexibility allowed me to shape a work schedule that left room not only for earning a living but also for reading, travelling, researching, and ultimately writing this book. And to the students of Bus Run 451, thank you for making each school day something to look forward to.”
A Clock with a HeartÂ
Dan describes working at Denny’s as a genuine win-win: flexibility for the occasional trip to walk the Camino, visit Mexico, or attend a reunion in Romania, in exchange for being responsible and dependable behind the wheel. That flexibility, he says, is what gave him room to travel, read, and eventually write.
It’s also backed by a company that treats drivers as people, not interchangeable parts. When a coolant line failed on his bus mid-route one winter day, Kyle arrived with a replacement bus within twenty minutes so Dan could get his students to school. When Dan needed an air-suspension driver’s seat for his back, Denny’s arranged it — and kept arranging it in every replacement bus he was handed afterward, without him having to ask twice. “Someone listened, someone remembered, and someone cared enough to act on it,” he says. “The standards are serious, especially because we are responsible for children’s safety, but the people are not treated as interchangeable parts of a system. It’s a clock with a heart — it runs because people care.”
The Absolute in a SpoonfulÂ
Dan’s memoir, The Absolute in a Spoonful, is now available on Amazon. One early reader described it as a journey through different places, cuisines, and traditions — familiar if you’ve already seen these towns, and a reason to go see them if you haven’t.
 Interested in a driving career built around the same flexibility and community Dan describes? Visit Careers at Denny’s Bus Lines to see current openings, or apply today.Â