Older travelers in England have been pleased to learn that from April 1, they'll be able to travel on local bus services for free. The free travel applies during off peak hours, all weekend and for two full weeks over Christmas, and a survey's already suggested bus use among pensioners will increase by at least a quarter as a result.
Hilary Bradt, the founder of Bradt Travel Guides, the publishers of books usually related to exotic destinations like Madagascar or Kyrgyzstan, is one of the Brits who's very pleased about the new scheme. To celebrate, she's planning an April trip from Land's End to Lowestoft--which means from England's most westerly point to the most easterly--using only the free bus services.
She thinks traveling across England for free like this will take about a week, covering about 370 miles. Sure, it's slow, but it's also free. And in Britain you can pay a lot of money for a slow, late transport service.
We all love a good round-the-world journey but you'll be surprised to hear about just who's been making a 17,000-mile, 15-year trek from China, soon to arrive on the south-west beaches of England.
The big travelers are a bunch of rubber ducks. They fell off the back of a boat (literally) in 1992 and an obsessive oceanographer named Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking them ever since. A few landed on Alaskan shores and now a big team of them are expected to wash up near Cornwall over the summer. Keep an eye out because the manufacturers are offering a £50 reward if you find one; although rumour has it collectors will pay 10 times that amount on E-bay.
The song might go "London Bridge is falling down," but the bridge to be seen at in London is actually the Tower Bridge--built, in fact, because the London Bridge just couldn't handle enough traffic back in the 1890s. The Tower Bridge looks kinda like it's out of a a fairytale and it houses the Tower Bridge Exhibition inside.
For 6 pounds they let you get up high to their glass-covered walkways with pretty cool views over the Thames River and the rest of London, and you can also see the old steam engines that used to power the lifts that get you up there (they've gone for that modern alternative, electricity, now). What's more, there are even special rooms where you can get married if you're so inclined. We're not sure if they have an Elvis chapel, though.
When is a bath more than a bath? That's easy. When it's:
the best preserved Roman religious spa from the ancient world.
That's the marketing tag on the Roman Baths in the English town of Bath, and that really does make it sound enticing. Here you can wander through the Roman temple, Sacred Spring and Roman bath house areas and see exhibits of artifacts from the original days of the bath. What's even better is you can listen to an audioguide recorded by the great travel writer Bill Bryson, which surely takes a witty stance on all things naked and bath-related.
If you want a dip yourself, you'll have to go to the nearby Thermae Bath Spa, where the water isn't quite such a murky green color.
One British rail company is interested to know how much you weigh. As a response to overcrowding on their commuter trains, the Southeastern train company have installed devices that weigh the train and calculate how many passengers are on it, so that they can decide if they need to add additional services. The critically overcrowded services (our tip: avoid these whenever possible) are the 6:32 a.m. Folkestone Central to Cannon Street in London and the 8:03 a.m. from Orpington to Charing Cross in London.
For Southeastern's purpose, one passenger weighs 161 pounds. So we reckon that if you weigh less than that, you should hit them up for a discounted ticket. But if you weigh more ... well, just try to look thin. And don't ride the 8:03 a.m. to Charing Cross.
Not everything that a celebrity touches should become famous. But tell that to the owners of a small café in Kingsand, Cornwall, who decided to start what they like to describe as the "smallest museum in Cornwall": the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers.
We're almost a bit ashamed to say that it is exactly as it sounds. Celebrities (minor ones, mostly) who happen to drop by the Old Boatstore Café and don't quite finish off their meal get the leftovers stored in a specially designed cabinet. If you want to see singer Pete Doherty's leftover crust, or croissant crumbs and butter wrappers left by other even less famous British celebs, then Kingsand is the place for you. If you're something special and leave a slurp in your café latte, that might get put up on the special shelf for the world to see, too.
The long-billed murrelet has become a major tourist attraction (or let's call it a niche tourist attraction) in Devon, England. Yep, the birdwatchers of the world have whipped themselves into a bird-ogling frenzy this week, and we hardly even noticed.
Apparently the LBM normally only turns up in Russia or Japan, but one must've got lost or fancied a Devon seaside holiday. Once word spread amongst binocular-wielding birdwatchers, some 2000 people turned up in double-quick time to catch a glimpse of the bird for themselves--including one guy who abandoned his wife at her own birthday party to get down there. This whole "come and see a rare bird" thing sounds like a cheap marketing campaign to us: we're just sorry we didn't think of it ourselves.
We'd like to ask our British readers if they're having trouble with their car insurance companies: it wouldn't surprise us, because they seem to be so busy doing surveys they couldn't possibly process any claims. This week one of these busy companies has brought us the result of the search for the most boring road in Britain.
If you plan a driving holiday through England, the road you should most strongly avoid is the M6 motorway, particularly between Rugby and Carlisle. The boredom largely comes from sitting in traffic jams and the remnants of accidents. Second-most-boring prize went to the A30 between Devon to Cornwall, a delightfully scenic-sounding drive which is apparently quite the opposite, and full only of cars and horns. Avoid these and you can instead concentration on car-sex (in a Volvo, as the Brits prefer) or just thinking about sex: that's what other surveys have proved Brits mostly do in cars.
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by amandak
Not everything that a celebrity touches should become famous. But tell that to the owners of a small café in Kingsand, Cornwall, who decided to start what they like to describe as the "smallest museum in Cornwall": the Museum of Celebrity Leftovers.
