laura_seabrook | More fun with Buses (Reply)

To start off, I got to the bus stop I usually catch and found that I'd left my purse at home. I left the trolley at the chip shop, ran home (sort of), got it and ran back (wheezing all the way) only to discover that I'd missed the bus anyway. Sigh. Decided to walk to the next proper bus stop like I did the other day. Then I caught the first bus to come which may have been a mistake.

It seemed that this was a temp bus driver who needed a bit of prompting on where to go, through the masonic retirement village (fair enough) but also through "the loop" in Edgeworth and Cameron Park. There are two buses around 10am from Barnsley. The later one cuts through the south of Edgeworth and then straight down Main Rd to the Glendale shoping centre. The other one (which was the one I caught) goes in a "loop" in the north of Edgeworth and Cameron Park, like the following map:

A long way but it covers the suburbs. However the driver needed a bit of prompting, and I was sitting in the seat nearest to him. Everything was OK until I was daydreaming a bit and he turned left at a roundabout that he was supposed to go straight through. After a few seconds I realised what had happened and said that he was going the wrong way (and the other passengers had noticed this as well). He decided to take a chance and just ignore that part of the route, however one of the other passengers got a phone call from a friend who'd been in that section waiting to catch the bus!

In the end he had to double back and pick up about 3 passengers and then go to Glendale via Main Rd. All in all the route looked like this instead:

We eventually got to Glendale, but about 40 minutes late. I thought it was sort of funny, and all I'd wanted to do was the shopping that I couldn't on Sunday. I noticed though, on the bus back to Barnsley, that there was a different driver.