Setting sail for Wiltshire

In keeping with today's celebration, I'm writing this post from the number 8 bus, but not the usual one. This one's from Andover to Amesbury, and here I am, parrot on my shoulder, and a chest full of pieces of eight... sorry, I'm 4 Ros leaflets. Tonight, the I'm 4 Ros roadshow hits Wiltshire, an area with little in the way of a seafaring tradition - unless you know better, gentle reader.

For a change, I'm meeting Ros at our hotel, which requires an hour long bus ride. This is an unexpected pleasure, as I've always enjoyed country bus rides since my years at the University of East Anglia in the mid-eighties. Eastern Counties buses were always a pleasure, and a front row seat upstairs always allowed an opportunity to soak in the gentle countryside of Norfolk and Suffolk. The odd stop at a country inn for lunch never did any harm either...

In recent years, without the time to ride the country buses at home, I'd taken to riding the buses elsewhere, in Mauritius or Fiji, for example. It's an unpressured way of both seeing a country and getting a feel for its people.

You also get to see places that the tourists don't go, and I remember a journey a few years ago when my bus suddenly veered off of the road down a track through a sugarcane field for no adequately explained reason. Eventually, we arrived in a small village of about 100 people, before lurching off in some other random direction. I did get to where I was going in the end...

Ah well, better dash! Aha, me hearties, avast behind!