Welcome to the Sticks

So, today I had to go to Exeter for the afternoon, for an information day I was helping out at. As I live the other end of the county, this involved catching a bus two hours before the event started. I didn't think this would be a problem, and cheerfully walked to the bus stop and waited for the bus to come.

It didn't come. I waited a while.

Eventually, I went back home - "The bus didn't arrive!" I snapped at my dad. "And the next one isn't for two hours!" Country life, my friends. Sigh. This is actually a lot better than some of my friends living in villages, who only get two buses a day to the nearest town. Anyway, I phoned the event organiser, who assured me that it would be OK for me to arrive later than planned (since I was mostly needed for the later events anyway), so that was fine. However, what was weird was the fact that the number of the bus route - the route which has gone between my town and Exeter since before I moved here aged 11 - wasn't on the list of bus routes by the bus stop. When I looked up that timetable online, it was listed as running at the times I thought, but the name of the bus stop in my town was wrong. Also, when I'd been standing at the bus stop earlier I'd noticed another route, almost identical to the one I usually took but a few minutes earlier each time. It seemed too weird for there to be two identical routes, and I got the horrible feeling that my usual bus had been redirected or something, and there was another bus to replace it (with a timetable which, by the way, I couldn't find online!).

Anyway, I walked to the tourist office, got a full bus timetable for the whole county, and looked up my usual bus route. It wasn't there - the service had been cancelled (and of course no one bothered to mention anything, and most people didn't even know). However, we did indeed have the bus route I referred to earlier, which for some bizarre reason had at least 5 different routes all grouped under the same number. When I eventually worked out that yes, there was a bus going from my town to Exeter, it was a relief, but I was also full of rage because it had been such a long and stupid chase to find out what the hell had happened to my bus.

Two hours after I'd initially gone to the bus stop, I walked back and caught the next bus. It was a long, unpleasant two hours journey across the county, traversing winding country lanes in an old, stuffy, rickety bus - the only good part was that I sat on the upper deck and got to see everything from above. Other than that, it was a long and shitty journey and the amount of time I spent running all over town to work out what was going on was not worth it. About the only good thing that happened was that after the event was over I had time to go to the local Boston's for a cup of tea (I love Boston's tea - it's loose leaf, just the way I like it!). Other than that - gah.