So a trip South to visit family for me and Ailsa is a great opportunity to spend hours on websites trying to get there the cheapest way possible (excluding coach travel - Ailsa gets very travel sick). On the day I did the searching the cheapest way was to get the train from Lairg, but fly back to Wick. This was impractical - life is much simple if the journey starts and returns to the same place. And anyway - me? flying? *
Eventually it was trains all the way (from Lairg). The tickets have just arrived in the post. The journey from Lairg to Hull and then Hull to Lairg stopping off at Durham requires a staggering 18 tickets. Why? Because, contrary to what you might expect, sometimes it's cheaper to book separate legs of a journey separately to take full advantage of those super cheap advanced tickets.
Even with this skullduggery, it's still costing us £150 for the excursion. If we could have been a bit more flexible on dates coming back we could have done it a lot lot cheaper. As it is we've had to get the most flexible (and expensive) tickets back from Durham. Thoroughly ironic.
Not a bad price to pay though, all in all. The total journey is about 1000 miles - so we're each paying 7.5p per mile, 15p per mile total. It would probably be cheaper to drive - but much less 'fun'. And then there's the environment of course.
* I reckon my carbon footprint is low enough to allow myself to fly from Wick one day - just the once. Cos we're all entitled to guilty pleasures once in a while.
7 comments:
I tried this and it was fine until one train was late. As I had booked separate tickets I then missed all my other trains and had to buy new tickets. At least with a single ticket covering the whole journey a late train doesn't cost you!
Dave
Ohmigod! See how isolated we are up here - I'd forgotten that trains could be late. Thanks for the sleepless nights Anonymous Dave! ;-)
Once flew from Gatwick to Kirkwall via Inverness (special circumstances which aren't likely to occur again). It was a wonderful sunny day and, particularly after having to go round the M25 to get to the airport, my heart did in fact lift as we came over the Solway Firth - spent the rest of the flight with my face pressed against the window. Never flown over the Highlands before - just wished I'd had a map as I tried to work out which loch was which. Beautiful.
PS. What have Forest Enterprise been up to?
Flying into or out of Wick can only be described as an "experience", ... and provided there is no fog ....
Mike Whay
I'm with you there Rebecca - although from Wick you'd likely go down the East coast - less drama methinks. Forest Enterprise was a comment on the amount of paper used for the tickets - obscure of course!
Howdie Mike! Good to see you're still checking in - are you coming this way soon?
Hi Simon
Possibly July some time, will let you know when / if
Mike Whay
Post a Comment