many reasons why surface travel rocks

[devi]

- Out the window you will not see clouds, which are pretty but get old fast. You will see rolling hills, spring buds, gambolling lambs, picturesque canals with colourful boats, interestingly decrepit old factories and rusting industry, daffodils, castles, primroses, ponies and rainbows.
- And the windows are bigger.
- Train food is a hell of a lot nicer and cheaper than plane food. Or you can bring your own yummy food and eat it when you like, when you feel hungry...
- because you have your bag with you for almost the whole journey.
- You know your bag is in the same country as you.
- You can throw your razor, your tweezers, hairspray and a bottle of perfume in it without getting arrested.
- Less than 10 minutes standing in queues, total.
- No one will make you take your shoes off.
- No one will search right down to inside the caps of your markers in your pencil case, while you hold your trousers up with one hand and hold your shoes in the other, because you've been told not to put them back on yet as there's a secondary shoe check up ahead.
- Generally, you will not be treated like a strange hybrid of potential terrorist and cash cow.
- You spend most of the journey actually getting closer to your destination, not rattling round in a consumer Habitrail with nothing to entertain your eyes but ads for stupid aspirational shit you don't need.
- You can bring a musical instrument or other fragile thing without it being taken from you, losing its Fragile sticker as it bumps down the belt, and tumbling out on to the baggage carousel in several pieces at the far end.
- No one is going to make you listen to tinny jingles that go 'let's fly let's fly let's fly Ryanair' over the most mindless stupid-house beat you can imagine, while you sit trapped in a narrow seat with your elbows scrunched in, unable to escape.
- You can listen to music when you want, not just in a twenty-minute window in the middle of the flight while the seatbelt sign is briefly off and you can barely hear it anyway.
- They won't charge you ten quid to check in and twenty for each of your bags.
- You can sprawl in the bigger seats and put your stuff all over the table.
- Tables.
- You get to go on an actual boat! On the actual sea!
- Catamaran go wheeeee! Crosses Irish Sea in two hours!
- Sailing into Dublin Bay on a beautiful cloudy-bright evening is, just, wow.
- You will actually get a sense of the size and the texture of the land you're passing through.
- It doesn't cost £25 just to get to your train.
- Drinks on trains and boats don't come in disturbing let's-patronise-the-poor foil bags with "BUY ONE GET ONE FREE FREE FREE FREE!!!!" written all over them. Also, they are normal size.
- No weird nose-desiccating dry stale air or ear-popping.
- If the airport bus gets snarled up on the M25 and you miss your plane, you have to pay loads of money to change your flight. If you miss your boat, you shrug and get on the next one.
- Counting airport taxes, baggage charges and airport bus, it works out about the same price as if you'd got 1p flights each way. Except it always costs that, no matter when you book. (Edit: this is just for the Oxford-Dublin journey. For some reason the sail/rail price is much less than just rail to Holyhead, and it seems to be fixed at £58.)
- It took me six hours door-to-door to fly home for Christmas, and I was left a frazzled rage-filled sore-eared wreck. Oxford to Dublin over land takes eight to ten hours, not that much of a difference, and I floated off the boat like a blissed-out Buddha.

Seriously, guys, it was awesome. And that's without even going near the greenness of it. I want to go on trains all over Europe now.

Comments

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

- Out the window you will not see clouds, which are pretty but get old fast. You will see rolling hills, spring buds, gambolling lambs, picturesque canals with colourful boats, interestingly decrepit old factories and rusting industry, daffodils, castles, primroses, ponies and rainbows.
That is partly true, but also, you will see quite a lot of not much. European motorways in particular can be deathly boring. And on a clear day the view from a plane can be amazing - I've looked out a window and been able to see both Edinburgh and Glasgow at the same time, both the Clyde and the Forth; that was amazing. And I've seen Snowdonian mountains sticking up through the cloud and flown over the Alps - views you'll never get from the ground, and it's AMAZING we can do this.
- And the windows are bigger.
That is true. A train we once got from Oslo to Bergen had ceiling to floor windows in the buffet car, and comfy seats facing them. Very cool.
- Train food is a hell of a lot nicer and cheaper than plane food. Or you can bring your own yummy food and eat it when you like, when you feel hungry...
You can bring your own yummy food on a plane.
- because you have your bag with you for almost the whole journey.
Now, see a lot of the problems people have with travelling is that they take TOO MUCH STUFF. I'm in agreement with Ryanair here that most short hop journeys of a few days around Europe do not require hold luggage. People get lumbered and slowed down by their excessive baggage. If I can do a fortnight in South Africa, including a full length bridesmaids dress, with just handluggage, then it's not so hard. Not that you can do it all the time, but most of the time it's possible. And cabin luggage is not entirely safe either - someone once walked off the plane with my little rucksack - which had my handbag, and therefore my entire life, in it - by accident, and I was left with hers. That could have happened just as easily on a boat or train.
- You know your bag is in the same country as you.
If you travel light with just handluggage, you know that on planes too.
- You can throw your razor, your tweezers, hairspray and a bottle of perfume in it without getting arrested.
I've never heard of anyone getting arrested for carrying any of these things - they'd just be confiscated. And you can take some razors on board. My tweezers and penknife are the only things I have to leave at home (I have no use for hairspray or perfume).
- Less than 10 minutes standing in queues, total.
If you check in on line, and don't care about standing in the front of the queue to get on the plane first (not quite sure why people do this...) then there is very little queuing involved in flying. On a good day. On a bad one it is indeed a bit of a nightmare...
- No one will make you take your shoes off.
Is that really an inconvenience?
- No one will search right down to inside the caps of your markers in your pencil case, while you hold your trousers up with one hand and hold your shoes in the other, because you've been told not to put them back on yet as there's a secondary shoe check up ahead.
Maybe it's because I don't wear belts and do wear slip on shoes, and am generally an organised traveller, but this has never been a problem.
- Generally, you will not be treated like a strange hybrid of potential terrorist and cash cow.
It might just be me, but I take quite a pleasure in NOT giving any extra money to Ryanair (in particular), playing them at their own game, and doubtless being one of their customers who DOESN'T make them any profit ;-)
- You spend most of the journey actually getting closer to your destination, not rattling round in a consumer Habitrail with nothing to entertain your eyes but ads for stupid aspirational shit you don't need.
On the other hand, you can walk about, have a meal, go shopping, do whatever. The actual travelling bit is kept to an absolute minium. I've travelled a lot between Edinburgh and London, both by train and plane. There are pros and cons both ways, but a pro of flying is that it's only an hour sat still, rather than 4.5-6 hours on the train.

(tbc...)

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

- You can bring a musical instrument or other fragile thing without it being taken from you, losing its Fragile sticker as it bumps down the belt, and tumbling out on to the baggage carousel in several pieces at the far end.
I don't have this problem with woodwind ;-)
- No one is going to make you listen to tinny jingles that go 'let's fly let's fly let's fly Ryanair' over the most mindless stupid-house beat you can imagine, while you sit trapped in a narrow seat with your elbows scrunched in, unable to escape.
I've had this happen, and it's horrible, but on most budget flights in hasn't. I hope they realised how counter productive it was...
- You can listen to music when you want, not just in a twenty-minute window in the middle of the flight while the seatbelt sign is briefly off and you can barely hear it anyway.
If it's only a twenty-minute window, it's only an hour long flight. Is that really a hardship? I listened to almost all of Bach's St Matthew's Passion (the 2.5 hour version) recently on an Easyjet flight back from Istanbul. Not being able to listen for take off and landing was bearable ;-)
- They won't charge you ten quid to check in and twenty for each of your bags.
People seem to miss the point with this. If you see taking loads of luggage as the default, then this appears to be very annoying. If you look at it as "if you don't take loads of luggage you can get twenty quid off your flight cost!" then it's a bargin. I've compared budget flights to more conventional ones on the same routes several times, and the conventional airlines charge the same as the budget ones *including the luggage charges*. As for paying to check in, if you check in online (simple, fast, and no queuing involved) without handluggage, then it's free. If you have hold luggage, then you don't pay, because it's covered by your luggage fee.
- You can sprawl in the bigger seats and put your stuff all over the table.
This is true. Though sometimes you get an empty flight, which is nice...
- Tables.
Er, ok ;-)
- You get to go on an actual boat! On the actual sea!
I can't disagree with this one. I love boats :-)
- Catamaran go wheeeee! Crosses Irish Sea in two hours!
I got the catamaran once, years ago. It was a bit windy and it was two hours of feeling very green and wishing I hadn't had that Guiness... Much as I love boats, I'm somewhat prone to seasickness :-/
- Sailing into Dublin Bay on a beautiful cloudy-bright evening is, just, wow.
Approaching somewhere by water is amazing - Venice of course being the best example - but flying over a city before touch down can be just as much so.
- You will actually get a sense of the size and the texture of the land you're passing through.
So do you from flying, sometimes moreso, sometimes less.
- It doesn't cost £25 just to get to your train.
That is true. But whether or not that matters depends on the relative price of the tickets. Sometimes it's still cheaper to take a train to Stansted then fly to Scotland than it is to take the train from King's Cross, sometimes it's not.
- Drinks on trains and boats don't come in disturbing let's-patronise-the-poor foil bags with "BUY ONE GET ONE FREE FREE FREE FREE!!!!" written all over them. Also, they are normal size.
I've not come across that. But then as I said above I don't give Ryanair any more money than absolutely necessary...
- No weird nose-desiccating dry stale air or ear-popping.
I've only experienced the dry air thing once, and that was on a long haul flight. Ear-popping, so long as you don't have a cold, lasts about half a second...
- If the airport bus gets snarled up on the M25 and you miss your plane, you have to pay loads of money to change your flight. If you miss your boat, you shrug and get on the next one.
I once had to pay (when I missed a flight home from CDG years ago) and once missed an Easyjet flight, and they were lovely and just put me on the next one for no extra cost. Though I do suspect that wasn't really standard policy...

[clarisinda.livejournal.com]

- Counting airport taxes, baggage charges and airport bus, it works out about the same price as if you'd got 1p flights each way. Except it always costs that, no matter when you book.
Yeah, certainly to Scotland the difference in price varies each way. Oddly too, while it may be expensive to fly on, say, a Friday, but cheap to get back on the Sunday, the train fares are sometimes the other way round, so if you are clever you can travel by one mode in one direction and the other in the other, and save money. It does take rather a lot of investigating and planning though...
- It took me six hours door-to-door to fly home for Christmas, and I was left a frazzled rage-filled sore-eared wreck. Oxford to Dublin over land takes eight to ten hours, not that much of a difference, and I floated off the boat like a blissed-out Buddha.
There is a BIG difference between six and ten hours. I've found six hours is the minimum required to get from my house, fly, and arrive at most destinations in near Europe. You then have half the day left. The extra four hours for long (or slow) journeys is the painful bit, when you really just want to be there, and means the difference between halfing half a day free and basically spending a whole day travelling.

A few points of my own in defence of flying:
- Flying is not a romantic way to travel. This is a hangover from the pre-budget flights era before the masses were allowed to travel as freely as they/we do now. If you expect it to be romantic, exotic, or even enjoyable, you will indeed be disappointed. It is for getting from A to B as fast, cheaply and painlessly as possible.
- Training it around Europe is not cheaper than flying, enough though trains are cheaper than in the UK. I've looked into it a couple of times, and it can actually be offputtingly expensive :-/
- My annual leave is a very precious thing to me, and I like to spend as much as possible of it wherever it is I want to be, not travelling there and back. Should I ever have a lot more spare time (and no less money, so that's unlikely) then trains will be a lot more attractive.
- Apart from the occasional stunning views, plane travel tends to be rather boring more than actually painful, so long as you don't cause stress for yourself by running late or not planning ahead sufficiently.
- I think it is AMAZING that we can travel as easily and as cheaply and as hassle free all over Europe (in particular) as we can, and it's something to be taken advantage of.



Btw, I just drew "Eurotrek" as my Grand National horse in the office sweepstake, which seems rather appropriate right now...

p.s. sorry, I seem to have written rather a lot, I didn't mean to do that!

p.p.s. I also apologise for the overuse of the word "amazing" and promise to be a bit more imaginative next time ;-)

YMMV, again

[jinty]

I can see that lots of your points make great sense for you, but they don't work for me. I'm particularly thinking about the luggage and the shoes parts of your comments.

Luggage for me is not just about carrying the right clothes / shoes (and bluedevi's point about the right kind of shoes for clumping about in is quite important for me - last couple of holidays in particular I've found it to be very uncomfortable to walk long distances in shoes that don't support my feet properly, so I do want a good pair of walking shoes as well as slipper type items). I also want to be able to take gifts and bring back souvenirs (which may include bottles of wine). I also take quite a few books - I have a dread of running out of reading material!

Hopping around the airport carrying belts, shoes, other paraphernalia is very annoying to me, partly because I'm not sure that it necessarily does make me as safe as it makes me inconvenienced. (Same with the liquids thing - it always feels like they're stopping the previous threat by the time that it's no longer popular, not anticipating any new ones.) I do aim to minimise this by wearing appropriate clothing to travel in but it's still annoying. In winter I am also burdened by coat and umpteen layers of warm clothing because I feel the cold and wouldn't want to deprive myself of the ability to keep warm; but it adds quite a bit to the inconvenience.

There is quite a big difference between 6 hours and 10 hours, granted; and I felt it pretty strongly when I went by Eurostar / TGV to the south of France a few years ago. It took all day and I was only on a short break, so I did think that for that trip it wasn't the best choice. But in principle I'd rather schedule in the extra time, if at all possible, and travel in what I'd consider to be a much more pleasant manner; that is, in considering the travel itself to be part of the fun part of the holiday. This would mostly apply to train journeys rather than to car trips, but in any case I can see that this is certainly in the realm of individual choice and individual values.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

You can bring your own yummy food on a plane.

So long as it hasn't got any liquids in it. And this seems a bit incompatible with the idea of having only one cabin-sized bag with everything you need for a week. If you're doing that you won't want to have a lunchbox-sized object in there as well. And afaik they no longer let you carry on other stuff besides your cabin bag.

Also incompatible with a small bag is the slip-on shoes thing. I do travel in them when I can, but when I'm home I often find myself tramping through fields and stuff, which requires proper boots. So it's either hop on one leg and then the other trying to get your boots off in the queue, or wear slip-ons and have most of your teeny cabin bag taken up by a pair of boots.

I have travelled extremely light at times, and it was brilliant - but a lot of the time, especially when I go home and people tend to give me stuff to bring back with me, or it's winter and an extra jumper takes up most of your bag, it's just impractical.

I very much enjoyed being able to do alternative shoes AND two chunky sandwiches AND violin this time with no hassle at all.

And the hairspray and perfume? Cousin's wedding. Forced to pass as respectable :)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of anyone getting arrested for carrying any of these things - they'd just be confiscated.

This was hyperbole, but confiscation is still annoying. It's easy to, eg, leave a tweezers in your makeup bag if you're travelling with only one bag, and then have to chuck it out at the airport. Another time I had to leave a good razor with my mum because for some reason I was leaving my other bag behind and only had one to fly back with. Plus it's the principle of the thing. I hate the unnecessary paranoia.

The actual travelling bit is kept to an absolute minium.

This is a negative point for me. I hate waiting around, don't enjoy airport shopping or most of the food, and like to be on the move. I love staring out the windows of trains.