The Return Drive
Posted: Mon 30 October, 2006 Filed under: Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel 1 Comment »Well, the return drive from Bracknell to Cambridge went OK in the end.
It didn’t start off well, as at 6 in the morning I couldn’t start the fucking car, and ended up having to call out the breakdown people. Turned out that the steering lock had engaged, and locked the key barrel of the ignition too, although it only took the AA man a few minutes of wiggling the wheel and swearing before it all worked. Fucking thing.
Finally left Bracknell at around 6:45, and got in to Cambridge for about 9, 9:15 – so not too bad at all, considering the M4 and M25 were starting to get busy. If I’d started off much later, I think the entire thing would’ve been a nightmare.
Would I do it again? No, probably not. It was more expensive than the train, more hassle (bizarrely) and saved me about 20 minutes all told. So no, not really worth doing. But it’s the first time I’ve been able to rent a car since passing the test, and it answered a lot of questions for me, so in that context the entire thing was a success. It means I know now that if I need to, I can rent a car easily – and in the next month or so it’s likely that I’ll need to do so at least once in order to go and check out rental places in Norfolk (far easier to do from Cambridge than from Bracknell) and so on, so yeah, it’s good to know that I can do it with no problems.
Mind you, I’m fucking knackered now…
Rental Car
Posted: Fri 27 October, 2006 Filed under: Getting Organised, Travel 1 Comment »This weekend, I’ve gone for a different plan to the usual one for travelling to and from Cambridge. It’s kind of an experiment, although even if it works out OK this weekend, it’s not one I’m going to be making use of a lot, I suspect.
Anyway, rather than travelling home (and then back here on Monday) by train, this weekend I’ve rented a car from Avis. Purportedly it’s going to be a Renault Megane, but that’ll only be confirmed when I get there later today.
Bizarrely, it’s actually costing me slightly less to rent a car for the weekend, than it does for the train ticket (£59, vs. £65) but that’s not including the extra for bringing down the insurance excess to something sane. However, the real test is going to be down to time and convenience. At the moment, the train journey takes me roughly 2½ hours door-to-door – and a maximum so far of 3 hours, including a delay because a bunch of little bastards all set off the emergency alarms in four carriages. The AA‘s route planner reckons it’ll take me two hours by road, but that also includes the M25 Orbital Car Park on a Friday afternoon (although I’ll be leaving Cambridge at about 2pm, so *touches wood* I shouldn’t hit the M25 at a bad time) so we’ll see.
Of course, there’s also the journey back on Monday morning – and I suspect that may rapidly become nightmarish. Partly because the thing I failed to include in my calculations of when to do this little experiment is that this week is half-term, which means that Monday is likely to have a lot of people travelling back to university/college/school/whatever. Still, I’ll be leaving at some ungodly hour of the day, so I don’t know what it’ll be like – and I’ve already warned work I may be horribly late on Monday, so *shrug*
Whatever happens, it’ll be fun, I’m sure.
Getting Off
Posted: Thu 26 October, 2006 Filed under: Getting Organised, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »I was reading Diamond Geezer’s post about how people get on trains this morning, and remembered something I’d been going to write about a while back.
Basically it’s quite similar to DG’s post, but I still find it fascinating that when it comes to trains and platforms, so many people
- Just get to the entrance to the platform, and simply stop, making no effort to move down the platform, and having no consideration for other people. (I know, it’s London, and I really shouldn’t hold out any hope of consideration for others, but there we go – sometimes I’m an optimist)
- Don’t know where the exit they’ll be using is at their destination station.
I find this particularly odd on the train from Waterloo to Bracknell, where tons of people just cram on to the train and find a space anywhere – then you see the same people walking all the way along the platform when they’ve reached their destination. To a bunch of people so obsessed with wasted time, delays, and anything that interrupts their little routines, I find this really weird.
When I’m using that train (or in fact any train where I know the route, the destination, and where I’m likely to end up) I try and get a seat at the place where the exit is closest when I get off the train. When I was going from Reading to Manchester (or vice versa, actually) I knew it was best to be at the front of the train, because at each end it’s the final stop, so the front is going to be closest to the exit. Conversely, when I’m going from London to Cambridge I stay at the back of the train, because that’s where the exit will be at Cambridge.
Maybe it’s just something far too logical for most people, I don’t know. It just seems weird to be in such a hurry all the time (in the example of London commuters/people) yet not be organised about things at the same time, so that you don’t have to keep on fucking about walking the length of a platform.
Sounding the Alarm – Additional
Posted: Wed 25 October, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts, Travel 2 Comments »Following on from here, Gert made a comment saying, effectively, that I could use my phone as an alarm.
And yes, I could – and indeed I do while I’m away- but I prefer to have a stand-alone device to work purely as an alarm clock. And there’s one very good reason for this, which I re-discovered this morning. It’s pretty simple, but still very relevant.
If the phone is on silent (and even more so if it’s on ‘silent mode, but not vibrate’) then the alarm effectively doesn’t go off. It’s muted.
And I have a habit of muting my phone while either a) at work or b) in a restaurant, and then forgetting it’s been muted, so the alarm doesn’t work the following morning.
And that is why I don’t use my phone a lot as an alarm. Because I’m a fuckin’ numpty.
Travelodge and Watchdog
Posted: Wed 25 October, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, General, Travel 1 Comment »One thing that interested me last night was to catch BBC’s Watchdog programme, which featured Travelodge being shitepots. Nothing new there – but I didn’t know about this particular policy of Travelodge’s.
Turns out that despite offering a “guaranteed” room when you book with them, they have a policy of overbooking, so you could easily find yourself still without a room. They call this a “last man standing” policy – although it might as well be called a “last man sleeps in his car” policy. Of course, they can then say they’ve got a room at another Travelodge, but if you head off there (assuming that you can, have a car, and all that jazz) and someone else gets there before you, you can still not have a room.
And even better, because you can’t get a room at the original place, you don’t check in. Which means that the devious scumbags then get to charge you a full room rate for not turning up!
Now that is briliant. In a sleazy scumbag way, of course, but it’s still brilliant.
Bag vs. Bike
Posted: Tue 24 October, 2006 Filed under: Travel Leave a comment »One thing I discovered last night – or rather, that went from “theory” to “practice” in one brief swing – was this :
The Big Yellow Bastard Bag provides a very rapid method for decelerating a bike that someone is riding towards me instead of around me. This deceleration method is very effective, and works nicely on the bike, although not as well on the rider of the bike, who carried on moving forwards for a short, but decisive, distance in a very neat parabola.
I’ll leave the rest to your imaginations…