I was on my way from Bath to the picturesque Cotswolds region of England. The only train station in the area is in a town called Moreton-on-Marsh. I figured that I’d use a taxi to get me from the train station to my lodgings in a town called Chipping Campden.
I arrive at Moreton-on-Marsh without incident, but discover that it’s raining and the station’s waiting room is locked up tight. No problem, I head out to the taxi stand. One taxi is just leaving with a passenger but the driver urges me to call her company to send out another car. I do that, grumbling internally about the trans-atlantic call. The company tells me that they have no cars available.
No problem. They have Uber in England. I pull up the app and …. no cars, anywhere. A different app says there’s a bus to Chipping Campden so I walk over to a nearby bus stop. A man who’s already there says he’s going to Chipping Campden, too, but the bus just left and it’ll be 45 minutes until the next one. The bus “shelter” doesn’t have much of an overhang nor any seats.
We’re soon joined by another couple who want to go to Chipping Campden and we then decide we should just share a cab. Between the four of us, we call about six more cab companies. Nobody has any cars available. Yet another person shows up at our overcrowded bus shelter and my luggage is getting soaked since keeping people dry is a higher priority than keeping luggage dry.
I text my AirBnB hostess to tell her that I’ll be arriving later than planned, there aren’t any taxis available and it’ll be a while before the bus comes. She offers to pick me up, says it’ll take about 15 minutes for her to get there. I gratefully accept.
Ultimately, my hostess arrives at the same time that the bus does. I wave good-bye to my new friends from the bus shelter and my suitcase barely fits in the miniscule trunk of my hostess’ Porsche sports car. It’s actually a good thing that she did pick me up. I would have still had to find my way from the bus stop in Chipping Campden to her place, and unbeknownst to me at this point, the post office recently issued her house a new address and the new one is on none of the GPS systems.
When we arrive and I put down my stuff, I ask my hostess for a recommendation of a pizza place that delivers. I don’t feel like walking into town in the rain to find a restaurant. Chipping Campden doesn’t have any restaurants that deliver, she tells me; it’s *that* small of a town. She offers yet again to drive me, this time to the co-op grocery store in town so I can pick up some groceries to make myself dinner. I end up buying a frozen shepherd’s pie (not great but filling) and some sandwich fixings and drinks.
Thus began my fairly frustrating stay in the Cotswolds because I had no idea when I chose this location that neither public transportation nor cabs nor Ubers are available (and the roads are so narrow that they’re dangerous for pedestrians).
The photo above isn’t of the Moreton-on-Marsh bus stop; I didn’t think to take a picture of the real one at the time. This is a generic photo of a British bus shelter that doesn’t shelter much.