Travel Notes: Planning for England and Scotland
I have four trips on the books for the next couple of months. However, I’ll talk about one. I have plans to spend a couple of weeks visiting universities in England and Scotland. I’ll fly to London, spend one night before traveling by train to visit universities in Durham, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Cambridge. If time allows, I’ll make side trips to other unis as I travel.
The devalued dollar left me shell-shocked when I visited London and Dublin this past Easter break. So, I thought long and hard in deciding to return to the UK. This is how I’ll make the trip more reasonable: 1) I’ll travel on Virgin Atlantic from Los Angeles to London. The ticket on Virgin Atlantic was much more reasonable than purchasing a seat on a U.S. carrier. And, the Virgin ticket can be changed. 2) I used tripadvisor.com to research lodging, and in most cases I opted for privately run smaller hotels and B&Bs that include breakfast and taxes in the rate. That cuts down on hidden costs, and is much more affordable, in most cases, than hotel chains. Although, I did get an amazing rate in Glasgow Marriott Hotel using my AAA card. in fact, it’s the cheapest room of any for the entire trip. 3) I will purchase a BritRail pass, which allows for 9 days unlimited travel throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The usual term for the pass is 8 days, but currently there’s a special that throws in an extra day. I’ve planed my trip so that I can use the first day of the rail pass to take the Heathrow Express pass to central London, when I arrive. And I booked a hotel that is walking distance from Paddington Station, which is where the express train arrives. I’ve scheduled the rest of the travel so that the nine days ends when I’m in Cambridge. I’ll purchase a ticket from Cambridge to London and take the Tube to Heathrow for my departure. 4) Since not all of the hotels and B&Bs have free Internet, I’ll map out free Internet resources prior to my departure.
The cheapest way to travel in the UK is to purchase train tickets in advance and to pre-pay for hotel rooms. However, those tickets and reservations can’t be changed, which is why I avoided going that route. However, planning in advance has gotten me to research hotels and B&Bs and sketch out a workable itinerary for the trip, and helped me to get good deals, which should be able to cut unexpected expenses.
The National Enquiries Official Schedule website is a very helpful resource for getting the lay of the land of train travel and fare information throughout the UK.
Another helpful site is World66 which is a user written and edited wiki site.
