Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Sometimes, the obvious route isn't the best one...

You might think that, after all of the travelling that we've done during the Presidential campaign, we might want to take a break from riding in trains. However, life goes on, and the wheels of Party bureaucracy turn relentlessly.

And so, my mind turns to a trip to the North on 21 November. Ros is the guest speaker at the Greater Ashfield Annual Dinner that Friday evening in Mansfield, whilst I have an English Candidates Committee meeting in York the next day. To complicate matters, Ros is speaking at Woking's dinner on the Saturday evening, so the arrangements are complex.

I'm doing it by train, and I've booked my ticket to Nottingham. I'm travelling first class - yes, I know - but it's comfortable, I got a really good fare, and they'll provide me with free refreshments and snacks. However, it's the return journey that's most interesting...

I assumed that the only sensible way would be direct from York to London King's Cross. Fast, but not terribly cheap... that is, until my eyes alighted on an astonishingly low first class fare, just £15. The journey time was longer than I'd expected because, as it turned out, the train travels from York to Chesterfield and then down the line to St Pancras.

Admittedly, as English Candidates Committee pays my expenses, I have less incentive to keep costs low, but the way I see it, money saved can be spent on something more productive than having me sit on a train, and I'm in no hurry to get home as I couldn't have got to Woking to join Ros anyway...

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