I’m writing this on Sunday, 4/6. There are no pics.

It’s nice to start the week off with good news. Jul & Pat have a contract to buy a new home. The inspection is next week. They will move in June.

I’ve turned my attention to our trip to England. Ballet tickets go on sale Tuesday. While waiting, we’re polishing the details for our time in London and I bought two of the three train tickets we need. We are traveling from Stratford-Upon-Avon to Windermere (two big vacation spots) on a weekend day in the summer time. I expected this trip would be a little more expensive than the others. But so far, the best price I can get is over 7 times higher than a non-weekend summer fare. Looking in more detail, this trip entails rides on three different rail lines. One of the three trips is 5 times higher than the other two. I’m holding off while we consider some options. According to the web site, the bus driver is handsome and friendly. (I saw his picture!) Even so Danita and I decided not to take the bus.

Since I was a teenager, I have heard about how great the rail service is in Europe, and what a shame it is that we can’t have a similar quality of rail service in the US. I guess the UK isn’t part of Europe. Or maybe “they” were exaggerating a little bit. My experience buying the rail tickets was a bit of an eye opener.  I learned that there are over a dozen different rail lines offering passenger service in their own separate service corridors. There are a few aggregators that make it easy to buy tickets when routes use multiple rail lines, or when one doesn’t know which rail line to search. One simply enters the start and destination stations, the date and time, and Presto! Options appear. There is even a link to find the “cheapest fare”. I searched both ways for the three trips we need. One time the standard search found the cheaper fare. One time the “cheapest fare” link found the cheapest fare, and one time they both found the same fare. Well, nothing’s perfect.

Moving on, I click “buy tickets”. I was amazed to find myself whisked off the aggregator site and on to the rail line’s site. Unlike US travel sites such as Travelocity, the aggregator doesn’t sell the tickets. Only the rail lines do that. So far, I have three UK web accounts for rail travel — one for the aggregator and one for each of two different rail lines.

I saw an option to pick the type of seats we want. Every train I’ve ever been on had two seats together. But just in case, I thought it might be nice to tick off “window seat” to make sure we had a window to share. The next thing I knew, we both had window seats; and obviously not next to each other. It took quite a bit of time to un-do that.

Seat numbers being acceptable, I purchased the first ticket, choosing to print the ticket on my printer. It required the last 4 digits of our passports, which I thought was a nice security measure. When I booked the next ticket, I was informed that international customers cannot print the ticket on their printers. I’m puzzled as to why the web site gave me the option. They already had my address, which clearly stated we live in the US. I’m not sure what we’ll need to get our tickets out of whatever machine they use, because there is no information about that on the web site. I guess we’ll have to go to the station on the appointed day and hope for the best.

Having purchased the tickets, I was examining the details of the route. That’s when I found that at one stop, we have to disembark from the train, walk a few blocks to a different train station, and board a train for a different rail line, which for some reason couldn’t share a terminal with the first rail line.

Well, at least there are options for getting around by train in the UK. And the fares are really quite reasonable. Provided, of course, one doesn’t travel between two vacation cities on the weekend.

We had a nice quiet weekend. Our big activity was that we got to the Spotlighters to see the performance we didn’t get to on our anniversary. AND we found free parking just a few blocks away from the theatre. We wanted to go to Taco Bell to try their waffle breakfast. They are widely advertised to open at 7 or earlier. Unfortunately, they have a strange definition of “open”. When we got there at 7:45, the dining room was locked. The drive-thru was open but we’re just not into eating breakfast in the car.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.