Heading Home for Christmas? Try Walking Instead

Up until last year I had never had a white Christmas. It was stuff that dreams were made of but I would always wake up on Christmas morning and see grey skies and feel the sub-zero temperatures but never was there a single flake of snow. And with this in mind it's starting to look like the weather has finally woken up and decided to make up for all of those years of black ice and rain clouds - and not for the best either I should add. In fact the irony is that the white Christmas that everyone so craves at this time of the year could very well end up ruining the festive period of thousands of people. Is there someone to blame? You can bet Santa's sack there is.

It was only but a few weeks ago that I was starting to worry about not getting home for Christmas. This was obviously a huge overreaction because I made it home with two weeks to spare - cutting it fine I was not. However it was this very overreaction that made me appreciate just how stressful traveling is. I'll put it in plain English for you because, standing out there on its own, this is a very harsh reality. If I timed everything perfectly and things were running fine, I could get from the front door of my house to my flat in Edinburgh in little over half an hour. It's perfect, and it means that I'm never too far from home. Then you take someone who is studying in Edinburgh from America and things get blown out of the water. It took me 2 hours to get home a couple of weeks ago because of the snow which suggests that in theory, it will take the foreign students in Edinburgh 4 times longer to get home because of the weather - if they're lucky. The question I pose to you is why don't we have a transportation infrastructure that is able to cope with severe weather? 

My favourite part of the news these past few weeks has been the weather which, I suppose, has been all there is to report. The Scottish transport minister resigned, transportation services in London 'can't cope' and people have had to sleep in their cars on closed motorways - it would be an understatement to say that the 'white stuff' is wreaking havoc. Trains haven't been running because it's 'too cold' for them which creates the image of the rolling stock being wrapped up in blankets in a warehouse somewhere whilst unlucky passengers freeze their particulars off in train stations up and down the country. I think we really need to come to terms with the fact that the climate has changed (although I'm not going to cracking open that huge nut just now) and that we need to be able to cope with harsh winter's - it really is as simple as that. Instead of spending millions of pounds on trains that work in 'normal' weather, spend millions on pounds on trains that don't freeze up at the first sign of frost.


So as the title suggests, if you are stuck somewhere you wold rather not be with the chance of not getting home for Christmas using the wonderful transport system we have, start walking now - you just might make it home for your Christmas dinner!


Happy Christmas Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve all and thanks for reading, 


Martin