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Published: October 2nd 2007
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With the working part of my two year UK visa up, the time has come to leave London. I’d dearly love to stay, as I am fiercely attached to this city now, but if you’re unable to work it isn’t the most friendly of places. Hopefully a return will be possible in the future, but the plan in the meantime is to travel until my hard-earned pounds run out!
I want to see England, as I really haven’t done any travelling since arriving in the UK - but I always have had eyes bigger than my stomach, (or in this case bank account.) Every time I am asked what I want to see, my answer is “everything!” A quick guided circuit of the British Isles was never going to satisfy me, and I spent my first month unemployed researching better ways and means of getting around the country.
The best value car-alternative I found is a month long
National Express Coach Pass. Called a Brit Explorer “Rolling Stone”, it costs only £219 and is valid for 28 days, on all
National Express routes throughout England, Scotland and Wales.
As this could conceivably cover all my travel, it looked like
Have pass, will travel
My shiny new Brit Explorer Coach Card. I show it to the driver, and if there's room on the coach, away I go. a great deal - until further enquiries revealed the fact that the company is completely disorganised, and makes no full timetables or route maps available on their website, or in pamphlet form. Nor do the so-called customer support personnel have any real desire to provide help to potential customers.
The website does contain a journey planner, but it is only useful if you are planning a simple point-to-point or return trip. For a month long journey all over the country, with a hop-on-hop-off ticket allowing route changes along the way, I was hardly going to rely on a site which includes unbookable destinations, features popular destinations and hides all the others several layers deeper in the site, and which might not always be available to me anyway. (It seems unthinkable in the city, but there are still places left on earth that aren’t served by Teh Internets.)
I knew there must be more information available, yet all my requests for more details were met with variations on the stock answer, “I’m sorry, we cannot provide this information, as we have over 1,000 destinations.” These missives boasted spontaneous new spellings and sometimes a complete removal of any sentence structure or grammar, but they were all recognisable as the same message. How dare I suggest that I would like to know where the buses went!
For a week I pointed out that in order to know they have over 1,000 destinations, there must be some sort of list, and that in order for the drivers to take the buses to their destinations there must be a route to follow - and eventually someone brighter than the rest let me know that I could in fact purchase a mysterious volume, called The Guide, from the website.
The provided link was wrong, but I trawled the site, and found the 2007 National Express Timetable in between the must have National Express mugs and baseball caps, available to purchase for £10.
I ordered it promptly, was overcharged on the postage, complained, was ignored, and waited the mandated seven days. I then queried the non-arrival of The Guide. My answers bounced, and then I was informed that all my emails had been found in the spam folder and had now been forwarded to their intended recipients.
The delightful correspondence back and forth continued for two weeks, during which time my £12.99 was refunded, and two separate people seemed to be sorting things out… and then it turned out they each thought the other had dealt with it! After yet another random email saying that they couldn’t help me because they had over 1,000 destinations, (proving that they do not even read the queries before they reply, since this was in response to an email asking what had happened to my order!) I was finally assured that the refund was “for the inconvenience,” and promised that the book would be on its way that evening.
Three weeks and two days after ordering it, The Guide arrived. It’s exactly what I need, a complete list of routes and places, even including a map of Britain in the front with which to trace the routes. Ambiguity is removed and the trip is possible. I am going to have to be careful not to get stuck in places where there is only one service daily, but it is possible to reserve a seat in advance for a £1.50 surcharge, so careful planning ahead should alleviate that problem.
I went straight to the Victoria Coach Station to get my ticket validated and the start date added - British Isles be warned, I’m off on Sunday!
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