When following The Dale without the use of a car and a phobia of coaches the planning has to be meticulous. My transport of choice.. the British railways. My expectation of things running to plan.. non-existent.
Boston away, its a great test for the trains. It's off the beaten track a little, but not so much that it's impossible to get too. This is a fair challenge. The planning begins. Let's cost things up. A return to Boston will cost £56.80. What the fuck sort of price is that!!! There's the old (perfectly legitimate and above board) scam of splitting up your journey to reduce the cost, i expect to make a saving, but that comes later.
I now know my route. A train into Manchester, Manchester to Nottingham and Nottingham to Boston. Just the two changes, but its a long journey. A train from Manchester at 09:38. It gets you into Nottingham for 11:30. Then there's a 20 minute wait for the Boston train, which leaves at 11:50 and arrives in Boston at 12:57. If all goes wrong then there's backup trains on each leg which will get me to Boston for 14:31. The ground is supposed to be a 15 minute walk from the Train Station.
Let's sort out those prices. They wanted £56.80. Splitting up the journey it costs approx. £11 + £15 + £11. That's a saving of over £20! Result!! When the price of the match ticket is added we're looking at £50 per person. It's still a rip-off but using your cheese box with the trains shows how to make a great saving! It pays for my match ticket, a programme, a drink and a pie. Awooga!
Everything is on paper and ready for the journey. All the train times, the phone number, wap address and txt service details if things go wrong with the trains. There's a few close calls on the way back, for example the last direct train from Nottingham to Manchester departs just 8 minutes after mine arrives. The only other route to take goes through Derby and Stoke. The directions from the station to the ground are printed out (thank you footballgroundguide.net) and a Google Earth map is printed out so i can see what the streets are like. Every small detail is laid out.
It's an early start and the planning has gone well past 2am. I need to leave the house by 7am to arrive at the station and purchase all my tickets on time. I retire for the night content everything is in place. But of course, it isn't!
Morning arrives, i awake and... i forgot to set my alarm clock. It's gone 9am.. i've missed everything. All the planning was wasted. Through sheer embarrassment i go back to sleep. Still, at least i've got DaleWorld.
So the non-setting of an alarm saved me £50. Perhaps subconsciously i wanted to make a saving over seeing the team so i deliberately didn't set the alarm clock. Perhaps i'm just thinking too much. Whatever the reason (probably brain-fade) i was gutted to miss it, especially as we won three-nil! The day trip that would have seen me leave home at 7am and arrive back at half past midnight would have been fantastic with that result. It's gutting when you realised what you missed. But we won, that is the main thing, and i got to hear it all on DaleWorld.
So there is no match report or thoughts. I can't report on what i didn't see. But going from other reports and the opinions on message boards it was a good performance by us and Boston were utterly shite.
I write this just 45 minutes before the kick-off at Wrexham. Had it been a Tuesday night kick-off i'd have been there, but Wednesday kick off and work mean its DaleWorld again. Fingers crossed for a good result – or at least better results that last season (Ferguson shouldn't have been on the pitch when he scored that screamer!).
Part time supporter, i'm just a part time supporter...