Slow Travel Turtle and I are luxuriating on our way to start a new adventure, in which we go a bit long form. More on this later today, but just the one hint for now: 1°45'21.945".
Some distinctly inefficient uncoupling at Cambridge meant a missed connection at Ely. With a brass swing trio in the bandstand, weeping willows swaying by the river and a range of waterfowl available for perusing, there’s worse places to have an enforced hour.
When you’ve been sitting at Ely for 2 hours because of a level crossing failure somewhere in mid-Norfolk, that little green light finally appearing on the diagram for your train is a wondrous moment.
Best that can be said for this rail journey is at least it is going to be free. And that the air conditioning on Greater Anglia’s local trains is pleasingly ferocious.
Trundling over the Reedham swing bridge on a gorgeous evening.
So the actual thread for the mini adventure of #GoWest starts here. I’m hoping it is a little smoother than the train journey to get here… 🐢
In October, Mrs Turtle and I set off to find how far we could get from the Prime Meridian by ground-level public transport in 24hrs. We ended up in the suburbs of Warsaw. Tomorrow, we’re going back to Greenwich for the inevitable follow-up: #GoWest24 More islands, fewer borders.
So, welcome to a misty, muggy Greenwich Park and the Prime Meridian. Since I was here for #GoEast, the front of the Observatory has gained giant grass steps, to recreate the original French plan for the park. Maybe that is recompense for robbing Paris of its meridian. #GoWest24
At 10:30, we’ll leap on this bike (someone is already aboard) for the short dash down the hill to central Greenwich. I must caution: this challenge could end very swiftly. I’m anxiously refreshing a ferry status page that already has one weather cancellation today. #GoWest24
I need to be in Lisboa for family reasons, and I couldn’t pass an opportunity to do another #TurtleTravels adventure. So tomorrow, we’re going to try to get to mainland Europe’s westerly extreme, Cabo da Roca (Promontorium Magnum if you are Roman) in 24hrs from London.#Atlantic24
What’s it to be, Mrs Turtle? Corby, or Paris? #Atlantic24
A bright spring afternoon at the temple of trains. Cabo da Roca is quite a bit closer to the buffer stops at St Pancras than Calabria where I got to on #Train24. But our Iberian cousins are allergic to cross-border trains, so multi-modality will make this a challenge…#Atlantic24
I’m in Baltimore - County Cork, not Maryland - to start another Turtle Travels adventure. This is a lovely village set amongst a stunning and complex sound and archipelago. It’s a jumping off point for ferries to numerous little islands. But it has something else too… #ireland24
…Ireland’s most southerly bus stop, here on Baltimore Pier. So that means, of course, that Mrs Turtle and I are - at 5:30pm - about to try to travel from here, in 24 hours, to Ireland’s most northerly bus stop, by any means of scheduled public transport. #ireland24
Now this Baltimore may not be the lawless metropolis of Omar Little. But it’s past is quite something. It was a base for judicially-backed English pirates until 1631, when Barbary pirates sacked the town to get rid of competition and took 200+ residents into slavery. #Ireland24
As you’ve spent a day chatting public transport, I can segue into news that tomorrow is the next Turtle Travels 🐢🚌 adventure. Join me mid-afternoon for a challenge I was originally going to call #CountyLines but then decided I didn’t want the police interest, so it’s #County24.
For anyone wondering what this is all about, here’s an index post of all my Turtle Travels Twitter adventures so far. And this is where you can find the video documentaries that come afterwards: youtube.com/@travelling_tu…
I’m going to court controversy with this one. Because if I am going to see how many 🏴 counties I can visit by bus in 24hrs, I need a definition of a county. And no-one agrees on that. So I’m picking the 48 ceremonial counties, as defined by the Lieutenancies Act 1997… #County24
An hour before I need to be at the Eurostar, so hopped off a stop early at Brussels Central. Is there any station on earth (and there is some stiff competition) with such a discrepancy between the dire platform levels…
…and the superlative architecture upstairs? Night and day, however figuratively appropriate, doesn’t cover it.
More importantly, it is literally next door to the Mont des Arts, for a picnic salad and beer.
I am on a bus (shock! No, let me continue…) which goes from Aachen (in Germany) to Monschau (also in Germany) but during the journey will cross the German/Belgian border no fewer than eight times (I think, it is quite hard to count). Now, six of those are due to the Vennbann…
Now, if Vennbahn means nothing to you, do give &TheTimTraveller’s excellent video a watch. Basically, a key freight railway partly in Germany was transferred to Belgium by Versailles. The railway closed in 1989 but neither country cared to change anything.
But it was only ever the railway itself that was transferred. So it created a Belgian corridor a few meters wide cutting through several corners of Germany. And that bizarre corridor, the right-hand red line in the loops on this map, is now the world’s oddest cycle path.