A Long Trip

If one could travel from Saas Grund to Bournemouth by air the journey would take a little over an hour and a half. Alas, there is no such service and, instead, the journey took 14 hours. How come?

Well, the party of 5 (Phil, me, Dot, Beck and Max) left Phil's chalet at 9.45 to catch the bus down to Visp. the waiting and the journey itself took up the first 45 minutes. The we had a wait of about 40 minutes before catching the IC train down to Geneva airport - a direct link. That journey was very pleasant crossing the upper Rhone valley amidst great scenery before hitting Lake Geneva and all the interesting towns alongside it - including Lausanne and Montreux. We waited perhaps 2.5 hours at the airport for our easyJet flight to Gatwick, which lasted another 1.5 hours.

At Gatwick the easyJet terminal is at the outer fringes of the airport and entails long walks to get to immigration and customs. There the official gave me a long hard look before letting me in - a far cry from the days of a cheery 'welcome home', which I used to get. Then we had to find out how to get to the main terminal with the train station attached, and that necessitated using a modern shuttle train now common at so many global airports. However, the UK version had all sorts of problems that have to be fixed. We were told, for example, not to board a newly arrived train despite it opening its doors and taking us fitfully to the main terminal.

There we had to buy tickets, not easy to do from the back of a long queue. We also had to decide on a route, not easy in rush hour; and we had to be in the same place at the same time, not easy to do when Beck went off to look for a book fot Phil and appeared to get lost. After a lot of huffing and puffing we had tickets for our selected route, which could have been easy. However, (a) signal failure on a grand scale made most Southern trains late ... sometimes very late; (b) the rush hour meant they were crowded ... and several of us had to stand for long distances; (c) not much connected because the trains were out of sequence; and (d) the cross country route selected might have been cheaper, but involved a lot of changes / train splits. We changed trains at Three Bridges, Havant and Southampton - sometimes lugging masses of luggage between platforms sometimes without lifts - and our train split at Horsham.

Finally, about 9.30 or so in the evening, we reached Bournemouth and managed to find an old London cab that could take 5 people and their luggage all the way to Poole and Camford Cliffs. We arrived more or less intact, but very tired and a little fractious in Max's case at Phil's apartment at about 10.15pm UK time (or 11.15 Saas Grund time). And so to bed. There must be an easier way!

AS