#busride - Diss to Bury St Edmunds (a bus driver is a person in your neighbourhood...)

The 10.30 bus 304 from Diss to
Bury St Edmunds - the pretty way...

I hand over my £4.50 to the driver and find myself a seat with a view. Luckily, it being a bus, they all do. There are quite a few people on board, about a dozen or so, for the Suffolk County Council sponsored service, a number of whom appear to be regulars, judging by the conversations going on around me.

And, on time, the bus pulls off, heading in a counter-intuitive westerly direction. It is then that I realise that the route passes by the station and that I could have saved myself the walk (lesson to be learnt for next time). Ah well, the exercise is good for me...

The 304 runs but seven times on a Saturday, serving the various villages on, or just off of, the A143 trunk road, and the first half of the route, in particular, takes you down a series of single track roads connecting smallish villages which otherwise are fairly cut off for non-drivers. The passengers are mostly retired - their fare is free, covered by their 'age related free travel bus pass' - which comes as no great surprise given how much the regular fare is.

The road to Magpie Green...

Palgrave (the course of the initial westerly route), Wortham, Magpie Green and Redgrave pass by as the bus makes its erratic way in a broadly south-westerly direction until we reach Botesdale, where Simonds, the bus company which operates the route, has its headquarters. It's a pretty place, Botesdale, but we're not there for long, heading for the splendidly named Rickinghall Inferior (there is a Rickinghall Superior but they don't have a regular bus service - probably don't need one).

North to Hinderclay, south-west again to Wattisfield (not to be confused with Wattisham further south!) before the route begins to hug the A143 more closely and the speed increases. Hepworth and Stanton are reached and I begin to notice that, how can I put this, very few people are getting on. Occasionally, someone gets off, but they exceed the number getting on. This reminds you that the service is subsidised, and that, if it were left to market forces, I'd still be in Diss. I'm not alone though, which is a relief, and I'm heading for Bury St Edmunds, a jewel in the crown of Suffolk, apparently.

Ixworth is a pretty little place, where the roads from Diss to Bury St Edmunds and from Stowmarket to Thetford intersect, but after that, the bus follows the A143 for the most part, with a slight detour to serve outlying parts of Bury St Edmunds, before heading to the bus station, where we arrive on time. The bus, and its driver, will head back to Diss in about ten minutes, but I have other plans....

So, two journeys down, £9.20 spent, and the schedule is holding up...