Lands End to John O'Groats. Imagine all the ways people have travelled the length of the UK mainland: walking, running, bicycle, skateboard... wheelchair. There is even a club that celebrates the more notable (or notorious) trips!
This challenge takes a slightly more relaxed and comfortable mode of transport: Public service bus. The rules are simple; no rail, plane, cars or coach journeys... just turn up, buy a ticket (or use one of the passes that several large companies have very graciously donated to aid our journey) and ride.
Because we offered ourselves for donations, the trip has a slight diversion along the way and now takes in Ipswich. Proof that people will do daft things for charity! At the start, the trip is planned to take 8 days to get there.
Basically, the trip looks like this:
We will be tweeting, facebooking and blogging our way across the country? There will be lots of photographs, comments and laughs (we hope) and we will attempt to capture them here. Why? Well, if we are going to sit on a bus for 8 days travelling the length of the country we want bragging rights!
Why are we doing this?
See the 'Charities' page for more information about why we are doing this.
Who Are We?
There are two of us making the trip -
Jez Howat: One of the key purposes of the trip is to support Jez's own daughter, Cariad. Jez is a Project Manager who looks after depot operations software for Omnibus (helps allocate drivers with duties and work out their pay). With a background in vehicle tracking and demand responsive services, travelling by bus is a little out of his comfort zone!
Michael Meilton: Is the brains behind this trip. An old fashioned bus scheduler at heart, Michael heads up the Omnibus Commercial team and travels everywhere using public transport. His background is - not surprisingly - bus scheduling, driving buses, and travelling on bus routes!
We cannot miss out our biggest supporter of the trip! Omnibus are the leading supplier of back office software to the UK bus industry - helping operators and local authorities get the most out of limited resources and keep things on time. Company Directors, Peter and Carol Crichton have supported this event all the way through and their donation of money, time and effort has surely been the glue that has enabled this trip to happen.
That is why we are confident about getting from one end of the country to the other... in the shortest possible time. We believe in buses... well, Michael does more so (Jez prefers fast cars!) but he almost always arrives to a meeting on time and having used bus or train (or combination of the two).
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