Well, looking at the title of this post, and its cover photo, you can already tell that they don’t really go together all that well. However, the intention of this post, at least in my head, was to cover all of the various means of (public) transport I took during my last trip. I was talking about that to a couple of people, apart from boats, I’ve done every other transportation there is, starting with a bus, and ending the trip with a flight. And keeping up with my recent post titles, I wanted to include another title that would have been taken from a famous movie line, so here we are now. This might be a bit of a longer post, since there was so many different means of transport used, but hopefully I won’t lose you before the end of it.
As mentioned in one of my first posts about the trip, which you can read here, I decided to take a bus from Ljubljana to Munich. With the price being quite affordable, I gave it a go, especially with the initial information pointing that we will be boarding a double-decker bus to get us to Germany. It’s been way too long since I’ve been on one of those buses so I thought it would be a great way to start the trip, and enjoy it from the get go. I did pay a bit more money for the seat reservation, as I wanted to sit at the front of the upper deck, but unfortunately, in the end, that was not the case, and we got a normal coach style bus. Thinking about it now, I don’t see a point in paying that extra amount of money for the seat reservation, as I thought I would be able to see more out the front window, but unfortunately that didn’t happen, and I was mainly looking out the side window. If I wanted to see out the front, I had to lift myself off of the seat slightly, just to be able to clear the 2 rows of seats ahead of me, so paying “premium” fare for a seat selection doesn’t make sense at all with FlixBus. There were other things I didn’t really like about the bus ride, like one of the drivers actually making me nervous, which doesn’t happen often, while he was behind the wheel with his driving, so I was literally relieved when we reached Munich, and I was off the bus. The fact that it took me a couple of minutes to gather myself and my thoughts after stepping off the bus, does speak for itself and shows that it wasn’t the most enjoyable of rides.
Being in a German city, I kind of already knew what to expect in terms of public transport. That is one of the things I love about German (major) cities, let it be Berlin, Munich or Dortmund, out of those I’ve actually visited. You can visit my Berlin public transport post to read even more about what it has to offer, to give you a bit more context on what I’ll be talking about in this post. Of course Berlin is much bigger than Munich or Dortmund, so things are not exactly the same, but it is fairly similar. While Dortmund is a bit of a different situation, which we will get to later on, Munich operates similar means of transport as Berlin, meaning U-Bahn, S-Bahn, trams and buses. With me spending just a few hours in Munich, I mainly used U-Bahn trains to get me to the places I wanted to visit, and like I said, it does feel exactly the same as in Berlin, just on a bit of a smaller scale. I did buy a daily public transportation ticket, which cost me 8.80€, which in fairness was quite a bit, considering the fact, I only got like 3 hours use out of it. But, I am the kind of a person to rather pay a bit more and not worry about anything when it comes to public transport on trips like this. All of your rides are covered with it, and you can jump on any train, or whatever else may be, without any hesitation.
The next morning, or rather throughout the day, it was time to hop on a couple of trains towards Dortmund, with a changeover in Frankfurt. I’ve also said a few things about this here already, but still. The first part, from Munich to Frankfurt, was a lot more enjoyable on one hand, but also a lot busier. I was sitting in first class, on a train that was so long that it took me about 2 minutes to get from one end to the other when it was still at the Munich railway station. The price difference between economy and first class was about 10€ in total, so I thought why not go for it. The train was entirely full, there were still some empty seats left in our car, but comparing it to how busy the first class on the other train was, it was like night and day. On the second train, from Frankfurt to Dortmund, I was sharing the car with 3 or 4 other people at its busiest, but mostly there was just me and one other person there. I might have been in a small bubble on that train, so to speak, as I’m pretty sure the economy was quite full, judging by the noise levels from below. But that wasn’t very unusual to me as it was more of a regional kind of a train, getting people from smaller towns to the bigger cities to and from work. So, doing trips like that every single day, of course you’re not going to be spending money for first class tickets. It is true there were much less people in that part of the train, but it was also a bit rougher of a ride, so each of these trains had their advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, they got me to where I needed to get and that was the most important thing!
As Dortmund is a bit of a smaller city in comparison to Munich, the public transportation system is also smaller, you only have the U-Bahn and buses to get you around the city. For all the travels I’ve done, while being there, I’ve only used the U-Bahn, as you might know that I don’t really like city buses all that much. After the first few unsure moments, once I figured the system out, and all the routes the trains operate on, it was actually pretty easy to get around. Due to the smaller size of it all and with me only using a couple of U-Bahn lines to get me where I wanted to get. A 24h ticket was a bit cheaper here than in Munich, naturally, costing me 7.20€, and another difference was that it was an actual 24h ticket, from the moment you purchased. Unlike in Munich, where the daily ticket I bought was only valid until the next morning. Dortmund also offers a 24h ticket for up to 5 people in a group, which then reduces the cost of the ticket, with a ticket for 4 people costing us 19€, meaning 4.75€ per person. Even though that that difference isn’t all that big, it’s still noticeable.
After that, the next time I used public transport was in London, which means – the Tube. For those of you that might know what that is, the Tube is another name used for the London Underground. At first, due to where we parked the car, we actually used an Overground train, to get us into the city centre, but from that point on, all we used was the Tube. Once again we decided to buy a daily public transport ticket, meaning that it was a fixed cost and we were able to get on any of the various public transport options, and ride them as much as we’d like. The ticket cost £15.20, which sounds quite a lot, but it was well worth it for the amount of rides we’ve done that day. Doing a bit of research before coming to London for the second time on that trip, before heading off to the airport to fly back home, I’ve also come across a direct paying system, let’s call it, where, if I understand it right, you basically don’t pay more than £8 per day, no matter how much you use the transport system. I could be wrong and not understanding that correctly, but pay-as-I-go made more sense for that second time in the city, since I wouldn’t be getting my money’s worth if I bought the daily ticket again. I would’ve had to buy 2 of them, which means another £30 spent, this way, I spent probably less than £6 in total.
Before leaving England, I’ve also used a couple of other trains, getting me from Northampton to London first, and then from London to Gatwick Airport, costing me about £28, give or take, in total. You can kind of see the theme already that I much prefer trains to buses from this. 😀
And for my final part, when I was deciding on the whole trip and planning it all out, nothing else really made sense than to just fly back to the continent, whether it be Italy, Austria or even Slovenia for that matter, as EasyJet offers a direct route between Gatwick and Ljubljana, which made things a lot easier. The flight itself cost me about 35€ I think, but I added some optional extras, like a seat reservation and some extra luggage, so in total I paid just over 60€ for the flight. Which, in fairness, doesn’t sound all that bad, consider going to London for a weekend, and spending less than 100€ for a return plane ticket is a bargain in my book.
When you add all of the transportation expenses together, the amount did reach quite a high number (relatively), but the fact that I was in first class on those trains in Germany, and just to be worry-free on any one’s city public transport, I didn’t have a problem with paying it all. Since most of the cost has been paid in advance, buying the tickets a couple of months in advance, at least, so it was a bit easier to justify and cover the cost of it all. Some new trips are already being planned these days, whether it’ll be by using public transport or my own car is yet to be determined, but stay tuned and see where the road takes me next time!
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