Our tennis writer Charles Bricker sent this dispatch just before the start of Wimbledon:
The British rail system is onto something, but it’s not cost-cutting.
The cost of traveling around this island is beyond an arm and a leg. We’re into other body parts, including your stomach if you’re nervy enough to buy anything in the café car.
However. . .(pause for effect) . . . there is internet on many of the National Railway cars. You’re thinking, “If Amtrak had this, and of course didn’t arrive more than two hours late for every trip, I might consider riding the rails more often in the U.S.”
I’m going to have to admit to my biggest mistake on this two-month European holiday/work odyssey. When I ordered my Brit Rail pass from one of those online companies in the U.S., I sloppily ordered the four-day “consecutive” pass rather than the four-days-in-a-month pass. Or maybe they made the mistake. I’m not sure. I’ll have a talk with them when I get back.
In the meantime, I found out rather quickly on my initial journey, from Euston Station London to Windermere, that this pass ($369, all in first class), could only be used on four consecutive days, beginning with my first trip. Don’t you make the same mistake.
I dealt with it when I got to Windermere, and it didn’t turn out too badly, though it could have. It’s only recently that the British rail people corrected the glitch in their ticket machines, which sold you the most expensive ticket possible for your journey.
If you still don’t trust the reprogrammed machines, and I don’t, go directly to a ticket agent at the station and tell him, in distinct terms, “Hi, I’d like the cheapest possible ticket(s) from here to there.”
So I purchased three trips – Windermere to Glasgow; Glasgow to Nottingham; and Nottingham to London.
It was about $20 from Windermere to Glasgow; $90 from Glasgow to Nottingham; and another $90 from Nottingham to London. It would have been twice as much if you went to a ticket machine and had no idea how to cheapen the ticket.
And so I’ve had my holiday time, from the Lake District to Glasgow and Nottingham and I arrived in London after a brisk, two-hour ride from Robin Hood country to St.Pancras station, just short of 9 a.m.
It was an easy ride on the Underground from St. Pancras to Gloucester Road, two blocks from my hotel. It’s good to settle in, unpack the bags, find things I thought I’d lost along the way and hang up some clothes that had been gathering wrinkles for weeks.
To regress to Glasgow, this was my third trip there and it hasn’t changed much, which is good. There’s wonderful contrast in this vibrant, very alive city. There’s old Glasgow and new Glasgow. There is striking contemporary architecture along the main streets, adjacent to 17th and 18th Century buildings. It’s still less expensive than England, right down to the free Kelvingrove Art Museum, which had an astonishingly fine display of celebrity photographs by the noted Scot Harry Benson.
This is a hard-drinking city and it wasn’t unusual to drop into a bar/restaurant near the rail station about 4 p.m. and find it jammed with a lot of very heavy and unhealthy looking people throwing down pints.
It’s gotten so bad the government is taking measures to curtail rampant drinking. Somehow, I find that effort laughable.
I spent most of one day in Glasgow on Byers Road, which had been shut off to vehicle traffic for Scotland’s version of Mardi Gras. No floats and no one throwing beads. But there were bands everywhere and tens of thousands having a great time.
It’s now Saturday at Wimbledon, two days before the start of the tournament, and it’s the first time I’ve encountered real, persistent rain since I arrived in the UK on June 9. I recall telling myself, “This great weather can’t go on. Wait till I get to Wimbledon.” Sure enough.
The pound is lingering at $1.97 and it’s brutal, but I just have to keep telling myself, “I’m not buying gas. . .I’m not buying gas.”
Cheers.
