A festive jaunt to Cambridge and My Christmas Travel Hack – It's AMAZE!
The lead up to Christmas can become so manic that in the final days of the Big Countdown, when everyone is rushing around like a lunatic and you’re trying to find the PERFECT present that is sold out but you’re determined to find it anyway and it’s all completely fruitless and why didn’t you start your Christmas shopping earlier, I can feel myself turning into the Impatient Furious Christmas Monster.
This means I have no time or tolerance for slow walkers, dawdling, perfume sniffing in the middle of the shop floor… and the biggest culprit of all – queuing. But not just any queuing, oh no. I’m talking about those queues that don’t go anywhere. Queues that don’t move. And no one questions their lack of movement or progress. And these are the queues that exist in train stations and make me want to do BAD THINGS.
It’s as if everyone is only just deciding where they might fancy going once they get to the front of the queue and are faced with the big electronic ticket machine. And then of course, no one apparently knows how to use the ticket machine. And then you hear me, at the back of the queue, crying and inwardly screaming.
Occasionally, not inwardly.
But. I have a magical Christmas hack that will see you through this festive period with ease, no queues and no raised blood pressure… and is something you will have with you for the rest of your life.
Allow me to introduce to you the Trainline App, which supports mobile ticketing. MOBILE TICKETING. That is no queues. You purchase your ticket online, it pings through to your app and you show your app to the ticket man at the gate (or zap it as you would do an Oyster card on the card reader) and You. Are. In.
No queues.
A couple of days ago I used mobile ticketing for a festive jaunt to Cambridge with a dear pal, and we did feel ever so smug as we sat in our carriage with minutes to spare, having bypassed the entire ticket collection process.
We sipped our coffees on the journey (it took us just over an hour to get there) and the time we saved faffing around with tickets, we spent googling fun and festive things to do in Cambridge and find out where we should go for a late brunch….
Cambridge looks Christmassy even if it’s the middle of Summer, so to visit it now, with the fairy lights adorning every window was nothing short of magical.
We strolled around the beautiful streets, visited the craft and Christmassy market in the square, popped into Fitzbillies for brunch and even had time to visit the North Pole for a skate and a ride at the funfair…
When it was time to head home, rather than the mad scramble for a seat, the BusyBot feature on the Trainline app pointed us in the right direction of where there was likely to be space on the train…
Festive hot chocs were devoured on the way home and when we got back to Liverpool Street, we just zapped ourselves through with our mobile phones and we were back at home with our feet up in a jiffy.
Mobile ticketing might just be my new favourite thing.
That and Vacherin Mont d’Or.
But that’s a whole other story.
This post is sponsored by Trainline and all thoughts and opinions are my own.
