Did not do parkrun Saturday morning, slept right past the start time even. Went with Mum and Dad to Botley Mills instead, to check it out in daylight. I'd last been to the Hidden Tap with the lads and wanted to see it again. Was actually too rushed this time as there was an hourly train I could get from Botley. So I bought some coffee there from The Artful Dodger, and had a cup and a slice of vegan peanut chocolate something or other. Then I got some takeway cider from the Hidden Tap, and didn't have time for anything else. There is a record shop I will check out next time.
Made the train with about ten minutes to spare, but without a train ticket. No mobile signal there so couldn't do it online, and the machine would not give me an option to use my Network Card. So was offereing me over eighty quid via any route, or only £27 if I went via Barnham. No mobile signal so I couldn't work out how to do that. Then I realised my phone nad flipped to aeroplane mode somehow, and by the time I'd got that back on I could not buy a ticket because the only option was collect from station and the train was less than five minutes away so it would not do it. I changed the time to get the train an hour later and it would, and luckily the collect from machine option did work before the train pulled in. Was a bit stressful there for a few minutes, didn't want to spend another hour in this tiny station.
Trains were fine but not too fast. I never did figure out the cheaper route through Barnham, will look into that another time. Went into London and back out again via the old slow route from Waterloo East down as far as Ashford. Then a rail replacement bus service! This was actually a coach, and fine. Rail replacement bus service used to be a sure way to ruin a weekend journey but this was OK. It wasn't much slower as far as I could tell, and it reminded me of the happy times on coaches last year.
Stopped at Tesco on the way home for supplies to make toasted sandwiches for tea, and now I think we're up to date again.
Guessing 1312 cups of coffee from my espresso machine1 probably comes to £1.19 a cup (including actual coffee and now servicing1 so not the 'leccy).
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town, Kent. Wed + dad to two, I am a full-stack web engineer, and I do js / Node, some ruby, python, php etc. I like pubs, running, eating, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, family tree stuff, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.