Day 63, 10 March: The Charitable Spirit of Small Towns and Local Buses

Norfolk Terrace, Day 63. The Charitable Spirit of Small Towns and Local Buses 

‘Here’s your breakfast, love.’

            Before me was a home-cooked, full English breakfast: sausage, bacon/ham (they were mixed), beans, mushrooms, and fried egg. The lady was amazing. She treated us like sons and after cooking, she just sat down with us and asked about what we were studying and where we were from. (By the way, it’s instantly obvious that I’m American. The taxi driver yesterday was from the states originally and he wanted to guess where. He got it on the first guess—I was astounded.) She gave us pamphlets for the bus schedule, the husband walked in and said if we had been at this on Thursday he could’ve given us a lift, and then the lady thought of a friend of hers who had commuted to work in Diss at 9 this morning. As much as they tried, they couldn’t help us, but we were thankful for their support. It was only £60 total for our room and breakfast. This was worthwhile—this stop into a provincial British town, which as the lady told us, used to be the main road from Norwich to London (hence one street named “London Road”).

Yellow = Walking yesterday (starting at the taxi drop-off);
Light Blue = Bus yesterday; Red = Train this morning

            We packed up and headed over to hitchhike for another wasteful hour, but we finally wisened up and headed over to the rail station for the second time (yesterday we went over to it but then ended up hitching that ride to New Buckenham). We caught the main rail official in a small house structure above the rail tracks but he was in the midst of pulling levers (there was a line of twenty of them) and then jumping down to the track to move the wooden traffic barriers manually. He wished us luck but had no authority over the trains.

            An aged ticketer onboard a train let us on for one stop; he was worried that the Inspector would catch drift of us past that. That’s the problem with institutions in the light of charity—they tend to be stiff and inflexible at the personal level. The guy—and others later on—would’ve let us on (for a longer distance) if he had a choice, but he couldn’t go against company rules.

On the Banks of the Little Ouse (Thetford's river)

We made it to Thetford. After the glamour of making it to another city wore off, we were stumped yet again. We tried National Express buses, since we had had success with a (local) bus yesterday, but we needed insurance, as in an express bus ticket would include that. Unfortunately, we had to wait hours upon hours for buses to come and we kept denying the local buses. After three hours (in when it was time for me to begin reading next week’s novel), at around four o’clock, we accepted a bus (well okay, the driver accepted us, but in asking three to four of these local buses, they all supported us and would’ve let us on; we had been picky then about getting to a big city) to the nearby town of Bury St. Edmunds (this is the first city/town name I’ve ever heard that is a sentence too). Once there, the driver pointed to a bus seven parking spots away and told us to take it. It was going to Stowmarket. I asked this time, since Dan and I switched off asking, and we were let on. We should’ve done local buses from the start, but if we hadn’t been lucky with that one train, we would’ve had to take the only bus line in Attleborough back to Norwich.

Mustard Yellow: Bus 1 from Thetford to Bury St. Edmunds;
Blue: Bus 2 from Bury to Stowmarket; Light Green: Bus 3 

 Once at Stowmarket, we waited another forty minutes to an hour for a bus to Ipswich. Waiting became easier the longer the day went—and our legs ached horrendously from the walking yesterday, so waiting on benches was nice for a change. And soon we made it to Ipswich, the biggest place we’d been in since Norwich. We had to thwart our plan to try for a ferry in nearby Harwich because at this point, at 7:30pm, we had taken a psychological journey that outweighed our actual distance. And we were utterly exhausted. We had travelled 70 miles, through each of the towns mentioned and past the green countryside views and the rustic winds of Time. That doesn’t account for the 4 miles of walking out of Attleborough to and from hitchhiking nor the loop we took for New Buckenham—as I look at the map now, maybe we lost track of the “Old” and “New” Buckenham all together. But that leads up to maybe two miles, not including the trek through the whole city three times overall. (For the record, we never did any illegal train hopping—it would’ve been a bit much for our consciences.)

I felt an odd sense of a metaphor in surveying the results of this trip: multitudes of failures to a handful of successes, much as is the outcome of most difficult challenges. I recalled reading that Stephen King had had so many failures before he got any type of success in his short stories.

The Trip Overall

There was also a great consciousness to what occurs in the absence of great activity, of the contrast to oversaturated schedules of modern life, when one lives two days without anything but a backpack and a steady supply of hope—outside of backpacking. There is pure, unadulterated Time—one doesn’t rush into thinking or reflecting but sits down (or walks) and the silence of the groves and fields gives one a sense of comforting peace.

 I can understand to a degree what it means to be the outsider, the outsider of a society run by money. That’s not a bad thing—it’s just that one cannot get anywhere without money.

The end of this day was a train (we paid for it) from Ipswich to Norwich—and making it back in time to celebrate Alvin and Vinnie’s birthdays in the flat. This escalated to a night at the LCR, running into Emma, hanging out with Joseph and Anna and Mo, seeing Vito, finding Alvin after losing others, and lying down to bed at 2. On the bright side of getting back early, I have time to study and skype today.

I can't say this wasn't fun, despite the long periods of waiting. Dan and I kept good company, had our sandwiches last both days (thank you, Jen!), and found it refreshing to be outside the bubble of Norwich for awhile.