Waiting for the bus

Published 8 February 2015

A person sitting by the roadside next to a sign for Glencoe Ski Centre
Waiting for the coach at Glencoe Ski Centre

When I’m doing a long distance walk, at the end of the day I like nothing more than simply to walk up to whatever B&B/pub/hostel I’m staying in, and collapse on the bed after a quick shower. What I don’t like is when you have to get a bus or a lift somewhere.

This picture sums up why. Waiting for a bus at White Corries on the West Highland Way. A bus that we were half an hour early for, with nothing to do there except sit by the side of a busy road (and despite the picture, it was busy.) The bus (well, okay, an express coach), would eventually turn up and take us to Glencoe, but in the meantime there was a rather dull wait.

The problem is that there’s a delay in the sense of completion for the day. You’ve done all your walking, but you’re not able to rest or relax. There’s another step that’s got in the way.

Still, when all is said and done, there are worse places to sit and rest. At the top of Glencoe, and the edge of Rannoch Moor, White Corries is a pretty spectacular bit of road to sit alongside. It was just a shame that even in this remote piece of rural heaven, the area we were waiting in was jusst covered in huge numbers of cans and glass bottles…

Comments

Steve Mills

12 August 2017 at 10:18 am

I use Googe Maps to explore public transport possibilities and have generally had good service from the part of the app that looks up bus and train routes. But I have noticed that some routes are less accurate than others, such much so that I have been out to check bus times as actually posted on bus stops in parts of the south Pennines. It is no real hardship if a bus comes five minutes later than expected, but where that means you miss the once every two hours country bus it can really mess up a schedule. There has been some attempt to coordinate different modes of transport (as per bus departures into the hills from Hebden Bridge railway station), But I have got off one bus thinking I had 25 minutes to kill (according to Google Maps) only to notice the one bus per hour shoot past a minute later. Even more reliable for the Aire Gap buses are timetables available at bus stations. The newer buses even have USB charge points and Wi-Fi!

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