Ticket To Ride

‎Kids

Study hard at school and do well in your exams! If you don't you may not be able to afford a car and have to travel by public transport. As fates worse then death go, this is right up there.

I am in Zurich, waiting to meet my next group of victims and shepherd them onto a coach which will take them up into the Alps to Oberalpass - source of the Rhine. I had the great honour of travelling to Gatwick last night using britain's magnificent public transport network. Instead of hopping in my car and wafting there in a hour of air-conditioned luxury I spent over 2 hours on 2 surface trains, a tube train and.....I can barely write the words....a bus.

I don't do buses! The reasons for this are many and varied‎ but can be summarised by 'buses are completely shite'. Actually, it turns out that my opening remark about working hard at school may be wrong. It appears that for the privilege of  travelling on a bus one must part with £1.15 per mile. I reckon the total cost of running my car, including depreciation, is less than half that.

Strangely, my fellow bus passengers didn't look wealthy enough to travel by bus - you would have thought that students and OAPS would have to make do with cars.

I have previously raved about the Lenny Henry Inn at Gatwick North. Well, equilibrium in ‎the world is maintained by the existence of the one at Gatwick South. Quite apart from being considerably crappier it is a 2 mile bus ride from the terminal. To add insult to injury, I now realise that the Premier Inn Gatwick South is FURTHER from the terminal the the one at Gatwick North. I could have avoided the bus altogether and taken the monorail!!!

'I thought he was in France' I don't hear you say‎. I got home on Tuesday morning and had a brief round of lawn mowing and pant washing (the lawn didn't take long but the pants needed a bit of work) then it was back to 'work'. I now have 2 weeks riding up the Rhine before a well-earned holiday in Portugal.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the EE network.