Travel Frazzle

[rj_anderson]

So originally I thought I was doing this research trip to the south of England and west Wales in late October, and it would be the off-season so finding accommodation would be easy and there was plenty of time to make plans.

Now it looks like we're doing it in mid-to-late August, and... not so much. Especially as it seems unavoidable that we'll be there over the dreaded Bank Holiday weekend.

I am, frankly, overwhelmed. Flights aren't a problem, but once we get into Gatwick, my planning brain freezes.

I know London is ridiculously expensive to stay in, so I was thinking it'd be better to take the train out of London and find a B&B in some pleasant town in Kent, although I am not entirely sure which. Any suggestions from those in the know? We'll need easy access to a train station, so we can get back into London on a couple of day trips, but it would be nice to travel a bit around Kent as well.

I'd like to visit Squerryes Court in Westerham, on which my fictional "Waverley Hall" is partly based; I've had my eye on Eynsford in Dartford as a possible location for the village nearest to where the McCormicks (and the Oakenfolk) live. But other than that, I know nothing, and would be glad of recommendations for other nice places in the area that we ought to visit or where we might stay overnight without utterly impoverishing ourselves (and which can be easily accessed using public transportation, please -- I don't think we'll rent a car until we get to Wales).

After we've spent 3-4 days touring Kent and visiting London, I'd like to take a train to the Cardigan Bay area of Wales and do some touring around there before we return to London and fly back home. Again, any suggestions for what we should see (or avoid) in that area?

Thanks for any help you can offer...

ETA: By "we" I mean "my husband and I", as we will not be taking our kids on this journey. So we'd only be needing a double or twin room, no "family" accommodations or attractions. Thanks.

Comments

[olmue.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I can't give you any practical advice, but I'd love to stow away in your suitcase...pretty please??

[fpb.livejournal.com]

all I can tell you is that Kent is nearly as expensive as London, being largely populated by commuters. I do not know what you wrote about Eynsford, but you might be interested to hear that it is often identified with the legendary Episford, where one of Hengist's battles were fought and Horsa fell.

[taimdala.livejournal.com]

I realize you aren't planning to rent a car, but these folks, CIE Tours at http://www.cietours.com/ do packages with air, accomodations, and car (any or all of the three) where you go as you please. My husband and I did Ireland and England with CIE. We got vouchers for B&Bs, redeemable with a ginormous list of operators with whom CIE has an agreement and there was practically nowhere we wanted to stay on our itinerary that didn't have a B&B. Our car rental was a nice little car, but there are many sizes to choose from. So we drove where we wanted, when we wanted and stayed where we wanted. Definitely, if you want a go-where-you-want sort of package, CIE is the way to go. We loved them. It was over ten years ago since we last used them and we booked through a travel agent, but their website may have more information on booking than I have in my head. I hope this helps! ^_^

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, CIE only runs out of a limited number of US cities -- nothing from Canada. Oh well...

[taimdala.livejournal.com]

Oh CRAPITTY! I had hoped to help, not hinder, you in your search. I'm sorry it was a dead end.

[doire]

With children? Are you prepared to live out of suitcases or do you want room service?

Most of the reasonable cheap places will be booked by now, but if you just want somewhere to sleep, the travel lodge type places usually have a room or two. Or you can live dangerously, as I did ones, and use late-rooms.com to get somewhere good and cheap at the last moment.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

No children, just two adults. We were hoping to stay in B&B's rather than hotels where possible. But we won't have much Internet access to hunt for last-minute bookings, as my laptop is not web-capable and it's so heavy I'm pretty much resigned to not bringing it.

[erinbow.livejournal.com]

Want to trade laptops for the trip? I have a sturdy web-ready little i-book. Would miss it but hate to see you be without all possible writing tools on a writing trip.

RE: a place ot lay your weary head: are you familiar with couchsurfing.com? I've never quite had the nerve, but talk about local perspective.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

That is prodigiously sweet of you, but if anything happened to your laptop the guilt would blight me for the rest of my days. Thanks for the offer, though! I am sure I will find some solution.

[speak-candidly.livejournal.com]

Not sure about other train services, but the closest national rail station to Dartford is Gravesend, from which you could probably get a bus.

http://www.bedandbreakfasts.co.uk/propertysearch.asp?browsecounty=Kent
and
http://www.kent-accommodation.co.uk/

are both good resources for B&Bs... a lot are very overpriced, but some small places can run for reasonable cost.

Train passes and bus passes for anywhere you plan on staying for a while should probably be bought ahead of time online, which is cheaper. When I went to Kent we went straight east from Blackgate, but from what I saw, anything in Kent is beautiful, inspirational, and will probably be useful. Lots of old buildings and ruins to fictionalize.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
Avoid the trains wherever possible. Mismanaged, crowded, appallingly expensive, and not in the least customer-friendly, they seem to be run according to the management principles of Prince Dracula of Transylvania. If you want to travel from one place to another, try and find a bus/coach. www.megabus.com can get you some good cheap deals if you plan ahead. And while it is sad that your laptop is not internet-enabled, you can find an internet cafe virtually anywhere in urban England.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

So, theoretically speaking, if you happened to be on the run from some homicidal faeries, and you needed to get from Kent to Wales as quickly as possible with said faeries flying after you at top speed, you would go by bus rather than train? Or is the train still the fastest and most direct way to travel long distances in the UK even if it is all the horrible things you describe?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I doubt whether you could travel from Kent to Wales without changing at last once, in London. And I would say that trains and buses would be roughly the same - except that it would be harder to run from a train in case of serious trouble. Most Britons would drive.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

ACtually, if speed were of the essence, I would go to the local airport and see if there is a flight. There is a well-developed (but expensive) internal air network.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Let's assume you are fourteen years old and in possession of limited funds (and even more limited time to make your escape), so neither flight nor car rental is an option.

Given that the nearest village has a train station and that you can buy a ticket from there to Aberstywyth (albeit involving changes at Blackfriars, Euston and Birmingham New Street), and also given that the trains probably come more frequently and go more quickly than buses would (though I'd be glad to be corrected if I'm wrong about this) wouldn't you be more likely to choose the train at short notice than anything else?

That was my logic in writing the first draft, anyway, but if I'm wrong and my young hero would be more likely to hop on a bus instead, it would certainly help to know.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I guess it would depend on whether there was a bus line available or not. Most bus/coach lines end up at Victoria in London, so it would be easy to find one going to Aberystwyth, which is a main destination. And if there was a coach stop in the neighbourhood, then the matter of limited funds would be absolutely decisive: while coaches are not necessarily cheap, trains can cost from three to ten times as much as coaches.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

It might be financially preferable, but if the buses only run twice a day and they take 10 hours to arrive, plus making stops every ten or fifteen minutes all through London... perhaps not so practical for the equivalent of a high-speed chase. :)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are mistaking coaches for buses. Coaches travel from town to town and only make a few stops - less than those of trains, on average. The coaches from London to Oxford, for instance, make three stops in London, one half-way through at a place called Lewknor, and three in Oxford. The coaches from London East to Stanstead Airport make no stops at all.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I looked up the schedule for a National Express coach going from Dartford Bluewater (the closest station I could find to the area I had in mind) to Aberstywyth. The results are here (http://www.nationalexpress.com/bp/view.cfm?d=2092558716573660A210820081040210820081150SH2108007I0825AK5736612183A0210820081300210820082005NX2108420O1300EB) and yes, it does take nearly 10 hours and make stops every 10-20 minutes along the way. Unless National Express is the wrong coach line to be looking at...?

Sorry about the confusion in my terminology -- in Canada we tend to use "bus" interchangeably to refer to both local buses and city-to-city coaches.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, if that's the case, that's the case.

[alawston.livejournal.com]

I think it's a good place to use a bit of dramatic license. If you could work in some handwavey way of said 14 year old acquiring a ticket cheaply (because it would almost certainly cost over £100 for a ticket bought on the day, although maybe as a child he'd get on cheaper), then it would be much faster, particularly between London and New Street which is one of the fastest routes in the UK and only stops (ISTR) at Coventry and Birmingham Airport.

The trains aren't managed particularly well and are over-priced, but the coaches have their own problems, and I wouldn't use them at all if it wasn't for the fact that there's a bizarre non-stop service from London to the village next to mine... The number of crackheads around London Victoria Coach Station would probably give you a chapter in itself. Not a nice chapter, either.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When I travelled by coach to Dublin a couple of years ago, the coach only stopped once on the motorwary and at the harbour. It is urban buses that make frequent stops. Coaches are no different from trains, in fact they stop less often than commuter trains.

[emmaco.livejournal.com]

I don't know about Kent, but my colleagues and I travel all over the UK by train (including some from Aberystwyth) and generally it's the quickest and most reliable way to travel. Buses get stuck in traffic (British roads can be very crowded!) more than trains run late in my experience. So if there were scary faeries after me I'd hop on a train :)

[kerravonsen]

Me too. When I visited the UK I went by train everywhere. Yes, it can be a real pain changing trains for some routes, particularly if you have much luggage, but the trains themselves are perfectly fine train-like trains. But then I always prefer trains to busses when I can get them.

And if scary faeries were after me, another advantage of trains is that they're bigger and you can hide in the toilets if need be.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I wonder what your standards are? British trains are the slowest and most expensive in Europe. They only ran on time since they slowed down the whole time-table, sometimes by 20% or more. And some companies (Virgin springs to mind) are notorious for unhelpfulness and bad manners as well as greed and inefficiency.

[kerravonsen]

My standards are:
- it's hard to judge costs in the UK because the exchange rate is so horrible that everything is expensive
- it's hard to judge speed because the UK is so small compared to Australia that it seems incredibly quick to get anywhere
- as for being on time, I'm kind of baffled as to how European trains manage to be as punctual as they are; so I guess you'd consider my standards lax on that front.
- as for unhelpfulness, bad manners etc, it isn't until one needs help that one runs into problems with unhelpfulness, and I didn't need help. Websites helped me figure out which trains I needed to catch, and signs on stations told me where to catch them, which is all as one expects.
- as for the comfort of the actual trains themselves, that varied depending on the particular line, but they were all reasonably comfortable. Again, perhaps my standards are low in that regard, because comparing with how trains were when I was a child, they're all more comfortable than they used to be.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your answer, Emma! It's good to hear various perspectives.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

*bemused* There are spikes in the seats?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thou Shalt Suck Thy Customer's Blood. If spikes were any good, they would be used.

[speak-candidly.livejournal.com]

expensive, yah, but I never had a problem with them. I traveled in the off hours, though, and never needed customer service.

Coaches are indeed very nice, however.

[--kali--.livejournal.com]

You can get cheap coach/train fares via http://www.megabus.com/uk/ and megatrain.com. National Express also do a lot of deals which may help you out too.

[tybalt-quin.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I think your best bet is to get a rental car from the airport because train fares are expensive in the UK and otherwise you could find it pricier to get from Kent up to Wales or even to just get around Kent on public transport.

In terms of places to stay in Kent, you might want to consider Canterbury, Stevenage, Tonbridge Wells and Ashford in terms of location. From a tourist perspective, I think that Canterbury would be the most attractive in terms of having local things to look at (if only for the cathedral).

I'd second the recommendation for Travel Lodges - they're relatively cheap, comfortable and clean. Failing that, Kent Tourism has a site here:

http://www.visitkent.co.uk/

Where you can search for local accommodation and get ideas on other places to visit.

Cardigan Bay also has a tourism site:

http://www.cardiganshirecoastandcountry.com/

I seem to remember that there's a steam railway near there, which your lads might enjoy.

[tybalt-quin.livejournal.com]

Ah - just saw you're on a grown-up trip. Still, steam railways are cool.

:nods:

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you go to CAnterbury, we might meet. I went to school there and love the place, and I am just up the railway and coach line. I could show you around one of England's great "public schools" - the kind of place that inspired Hogwarts and featured in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

[alawston.livejournal.com]

Any trip to Wales must surely take in a photo op on Torchwood's magic paving slab...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Why not the original sets for The Prisoner? That is actually a small town in Wales, built by a mad aristocrat (IIRC) to his own design...

[alawston.livejournal.com]

Portmeirion, also used by the Doctor Who team for Masque of Mandragora in the 1970s. I guess I'm just a bit of a sucker for Cardiff's regeneration, particularly as you have a reasonable chance these days of bumping into the Doctor Who, Torchwood or Sarah Jane Adventures crews filming.

[sarahcross.livejournal.com]

No advice but I love your new Knife icon. ♥

[kagiri.livejournal.com]

Hmm...well, I lived in London for a semester at a place called the Highbury Centre. It's a guesthouse that's an easy 10-minute walk from the Highbury and Islington tube stop on the Victoria line. I know you're looking at Kent, and the HC isn't exactly the cheapest place, but it's a lovely area and the breakfasts are wonderful. (Cadbury spread...mmmm!)

If you're going to be in that area and you've never done it before, I'd highly recommend going on a day trip to Canterbury. The cathedral is the most beautiful I've ever seen and there are some very old ruins from the Augustinian mission from Rome. The whole town is wonderful and it's an excellent opportunity to brush up on your Chaucer!

In London itself, set some time aside to stroll down Oxford Street and stop in a tea or coffee shop. Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square are musts, but I'm sure you know that already! : ) Have a great trip....

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Eynsford is bung full of ye olde tea shoppes and there should be B&Bs but whether they have any vacancies then is another matter. It's got the oldest stone-built Norman castle in England (curtain wall and a stone hall-house in the middle; one of my exercises in archaeological draughtmanship was to do a drawing of it burning down) and just down the road (and across the ford) from Lullingstone Roman Villa, so is a bit of a tourist magnet in a small way. Here's the website for it: http://www.eynsfordvillage.org.uk/

I have a particular liking for the Darent Valley: the average village has a nearby Iron Age site, a Roman villa and an entry in the Domesday Book, and Darenth has a Saxon church. At Farningham, an Iron Age settlement was found when they were building the motorway: apparently in about AD 50 they moved out, lock stock and barrel, for a trendy rectangular Roman style cottage down by the river. They left all their pots and pans; it appears that nasty old-fashioned stuff was not what they had in mind for their fancy new Roman lifestyle. The cottage later developed into a fancy villa so big that at first it looked as though there were two of them.

If you're going to even try to travel over the Bank Holiday weekend I second the suggestion of hiring a car. It's not just that the trains will be jam-packed, in crucial areas they are likely to be not there at all because of mainenance work on the lines, which means that a lot of journeys involve getting off the train, getting on a bus and then getting on a train again.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful -- exactly the sort of information I'm interested in. Thank you so much!

I am still desperately trying to think how we can NOT be in the UK that Bank Holiday weekend, because I know it's going to be massively inconvenient for just about every purpose there is. But we'll see.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

North-west of Canterbury there is a village called Faversham. Saxon-fixated etimologists originally understood this as "Feofar's Home", Feofar being some sort of AS name. However, archaeology has shown that the village was dedicated, from before Roman times continuously until well into the English Dark Ages, to iron-smithing. As I imagine you know, the smith was faber in Latin, and Faversham was obviously "The home of the smiths". (Industrial sites in Roman times were normally outside town areas, because of the smelly and dangerous nature of such things as leather making and the heavy use of fire in kilns, smithies and so on.) This place would surely be bad news for fairies, since English tradition insists that iron drives them away. You could imagine Faversham as a kind of faerie Hell or Mordor.

[asphodeline.livejournal.com]

I think we're quite out of your way for research etc. here in Cheshire but if not, you are welcome. Near-ish to Manchester.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually Cheshire has some amazing traditions, such as a lake that is supposed to be bottomless, enchanted and dangerous.

[owl]

Fantabulous icon! That cover art really is great.

[kerravonsen]

Knife icon!

[profshallowness.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, yes, you'll probably need a car in Wales if you're going to do decent travelling. Presumably you'll take the train to Aberystwyth - the journey through mid Wales is lovely. Aberystwyth houses the National Library of Wales, which you might find worth a visit, depends what exhibitions they've got on, a castle and modern druidic rings. It's got a Victorian seafront, a lovely prom if it's fine or stormy and a pebbled beach. It may not be the cheapest place, and it will be full, and I'm biased because I went to uni there.

To the north, Ynys-Las has striking scenery, Machynlleth is a market town with interesting history. Portmeirion isn't exactly down the road! But gorgeous coastline. To the south there are beaches and countryside, and history everywhere. Try to see a cromlech site. Visitwales is the official tourist website for the country.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Okay. Chiming in because no one else mentioned it. We lived in Rochester when I was a child, and you really shouldn't miss Rochester castle (one of the two oldest in the UK) and the Cathedral. Canterbury of course is a must. When I was a kid, we took the train to and from London all the time, and also more locally; it's about an hour to Victoria station in central London from there. But not cheap, no. Nothing in the U.K. is cheap now, especially for North Americans. As I remember, Rochester/Chatham, Canterbury, and Dover are all on the same train line, but you probably won't have time to get to Dover. It sounds like a fascinating trip!

Oh, and by my NY standards, I found the trains on time and not uncomfortable, but they certainly aren't cheap, especially for longer distances. Is there still such a thing as a Britrail pass? Might that help?