Doughnuts On The Mound - A cheap ride home

Doughnuts On The Mound – A cheap ride home

In this epic day trip (and it t’was epic)

With the plane at the stand, and everyone aboard the shuttle bus, it was time for a ride around Birmingham Airport to the Channel Islands and Republic of Ireland Arrivals door.

Thanks EI-FAT!

Although it’s nice to see an Air India Boeing 787 too.

With everyone out, it was time to navigate the airport, and from arrivals to the public area.

This way it seems!

Going this way passes the UK Border (and thus you are cleared to enter the UK straight way thanks to the Common Travel Area.

From here, you’re spat out near belt six… and if you have luggage, given a reminder how long you have to wait.

Good luck with that…

As I had no luggage, I proceeded through customs.

With the formalities complete, I was back in the terminal area. After parting ways with Pete, I had two choices to get home – either another Uber – or take the train home.

And looking at the cost of that Uber earlier on – the cheap train it is.

Even at 7pm in the evening, Birmingham Airport is busy – there’s still plenty of bucket and spade traffic, but also there’s the evening Air India and Emirates departure to contend with (and with using a two-class A380 – that’s a fair number of people).

Negotiating the departures level, I headed up to the Air-Rail link, and jumped aboard a waiting cable-liner back to the train station

To the trains.

There are many different train fares you can use to get between Birmingham Airport and Birmingham New Street (varying from First Class Tickets to Standard fares, to Virgin Trains Only fares).

However, there’s another fare if you’re travelling in the West Midlands Region after 18:30 in the evening – which allows you to travel between two rail stations in the in the area for £2.50.

That’ll do nicely. As the ticket is valid on any train service, I could grab the first one that came along – that happened to be the local to New Street station.

Can’t win them all.

With a 15 minute train ride, it was a matter of going through the tweets that had been building up since I landed

A local train for local people!

It might be a local run, but people were taking advantage of the discounted ticketing at this time of day to go into Central Birmingham for the evening.

The train took off, and headed past the airport, and took the permanent way to Birmingham New Street.

See you again sometime Birmingham Airport.

As for me? I wanted to head home.

15 minutes later I was a step closer to home with the train pulling into New Street station

I headed out of the station and passed the barriers (which caught a few people forgot to buy tickets… it doesn’t pay to be too cheap in Birmingham).

From there it was time to head out to the open air, and towards the bus stop for the final part of the trip home.

Out into the light – The Bullring shopping centre in front of me

From there, it was a case of walking out of the station, turning left and waiting for a bus to turn up – and one did… like they always do in Birmingham.

10 minutes later and £1.50, I was at my front door at the end of an enjoyable day out. And 60Gb of data to back up.

The end of a cheap ride home… my front door.

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Doughnuts On The Mound – A cheap ride home

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