Daytripping

I’ve just booked myself a day trip to Glasgow in June. Not the sanest of ideas when I live in the far South West of England. But with the combination of Easyjet having a sale and the ability to spend Nectar points on flights I grabbed some tickets for the princely sum of £13! Amusingly this is more then it will cost to park for the day at Bristol Airport.

Hopefully I'll be spending my time up there seeing a good friend of mine, but if she can't make it then I'll have a good look around.

On the subject of spontaneous day trips, I’ve been wondering where I can get to and back in a day for the least money. I set myself an nominal £50 budget with £60-70 as a maximum. One itinerary I managed to come up with was a trip to Manchester .

• Cycle to Exeter Airport - Free
• Fly to Manchester - £40 
• Train/Bus into the city - £4.50
• Lunch and meeting friends - not including in the budget 
• Megabus back to Exeter - £12 

Plus the extra of the bus back to Exeter airport to collect the bike the following day!
Think I might play with a few more travel sites over the next few days and see what else I can come up with

Update: The local airline has hiked their fees again (doubling of card fee and 'fuel recovery' fees) so it looks like that idea might be a non starter now.

Not a good place to live if you want to travel.

I sometimes wonder if living some way from a major city is a hurdle to travel. I do have an airport on my doorstep, and it does have a range of domestic and ex-pat destinations (ie areas with a large British population), but most flights operate either weekly or a random selection of days, which doesn’t make it easy to plan a short break away. Plus the local airline is very expensive due to lack of competition. There are more flights from a larger airport about 70 miles away, but again they are mostly to holiday destinations but there are at least some flights to major cities (and long haul connections via Dublin, Paris and Amsterdam). Heathrow of course is about 3-4 hours away.

I guess when trying to do Europe on a budget it can be a bit off-putting that 2 days parking at the airport costs more then the flight does! (when flying from my city's airport I take the bus) I’m jealous of those who are within stepping distance of somewhere like Heathrow. Of course my finances are probably better off if I’m not near Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted.


Needless to say I do have some plans in the making, even if I will have to pay the parking...