At 1/22/09 08:59 AM, liaaaam wrote:
At 1/21/09 02:54 PM, Luis wrote:
LilJim mentioned York as being something of that nature. Its apparently 1.5 hrs out of london and accessible by people up north in scotland and such.
York is a fantastic city but it is way too far to commute to London. When you said somewhere outside of London I thought you meant not far outside of London; just past the outskirts in some small place. York is halfway up the country and a train ticket to London would be expensive (maybe only £10 if you book in advance but that'd probably be £20 return).
Leeds has been mentioned by Coop and BBM, I'm from there and I have to say it's a brilliant city - the night life is brilliant, there are tonnes of pubs (I think most of us prefer pubs to clubs when we're trying to get to know people :p), it's very cheap - you'll be surprised how cheap everything is compared to London. There's a huge train station (about the size of London Kings Cross) and there is an airport (Leeds & Bradford) although it's probably better to get a train to Manchester and then the train over to Leeds. As for accommodation, I don't know where you could find a nice detached house or something but it would definitely be cheaper than the flat Tom rented.
Um... Leeds is further to commute to and from London than York is and as far as I'm aware, there's no direct train line (if there is, it'll be a crawler.)
That would mean that if you were coming up from London to Leeds, you'd have to either get the West Coast line to Manchester and across to Leeds, or up the East coast line to either York or Doncaster (possibly Sheffield?) and then the line over from there. Either way, both routes are more difficult to commute to and from London for the main day (if, from Luis' latest comments, that is still the plan - doesn't seem to be) than York.
I'm not saying it SHOULD be York, btw - it just occured to me that it's pretty much bang in the middle of the UK and more or less in the centre of a lot of train networks when Luis and I were talking about it. I've travelled to York from Glasgow (requires a connecting train to Edinburgh, which takes around 40 minutes) and Edinburgh before, so that doesn't exclude some of the Scottish contingent who might want to come down and return the same day, as the trains are frequent and run reasonably late into the night. Booking in advance makes things cheap, too.
As someone else already said, there's a lot of touristy stuff to do in York, which won't appeal to many people coming from the UK, since they may have already been there/done that, or are just there solely for the meet up day itself, in which case, the emphasis is on spending time with the people there rather than anything else.
However, if people are flying in from places as far away as the US, Canada, etc, and are wanting to stay for nearly a week, I think it's important to put their needs before those coming from relatively local places. They need to do something during the rest of the week and there is plenty to do in York.
As for Train times from King's Cross to York, I wasn't THAT far off (hours:minutes below):
2:02 2:07 1:53 1:56 1:51 2:10 2:11 2:00 2:12 2:08
I'm going to stop writing about York now, because I brought up the York Races with Luis as we got a little more into conversation about a good place to hold the August meet up, if it ever transpires.... And the whole city is overrun with people and prices for accommodation, drinks and food tends to go through the roof during the Races, so I agree that it's a no go.
However, what appeals to me about a smaller city is the fact that it's easier to get to whatever accommodation you're staying in. Not everyone will be staying in whatever group apartment might be arranged.
I had a complete nightmare coming down to London (come to think about it, just about every time I've been to London, I've had problems either on the way down on the way back.)
I got caught up in two traffic accidents on the drive down, which set me back four hours. It took around 6 and a half hours to get down there and two and a half hours to drive back. That delay completely wrote off Friday night for me, which I was looking forward to, since I didn't get into the Docklands, where I was staying at a friend's apartment, until 9pm.
At that time, it wasn't worth going into the city, since that's a 50 minute train journey and the last train back was something like 12am (and I needed to eat during that time) and by the time I got a text from Tim saying that everyone was at Tower Hill, it was like 10:30pm - which is only 20 minutes away from where I was staying, had the trains been running (there were works on Jubilee) and that would have only given me around an hour there, too (or a taxi ride and I'm not sure how easily I could have hailed or ordered a cab from there.)
By the night of the meet up, after leaving the Tower Hamlet apartment and having a walkthrough meal through McDonald's (where I ran into a couple of guys trying to get me and a couple of others (anyone remember this?) to convert to Islam (I thought part of that religion prohibited followers from consuming alchohol, but these guys were obviously very drunk), Tom, Tim, Bob, Rob, Mike and I started walking back to their apartment, with the intention of getting a night bus back to their flat.....
I realised at that point that I had the only security keys for my friend's apartment I was supposed to be staying in that night... And had to get back there, otherwise he'd be potentially held as a prisoner in his own home until I managed to get back there the following day. I had to take a taxi and thankfully I did that at a point where it would cost a lot less than if I'd gone to the staff apartment - it cost £20/$35 ish. I'd be looking at three times that from the place the staff were staying at.
I suppose that's what appeals to me about choosing a smaller city - it wouldn't matter where you stay in that case, because you're never more than a 30 minute ride in a cab from one corner of the city to another.
On that note... can't believe I hadn't thought about this before. Newcastle - it's a fantastic night out, about 1 hr 30 mins to either York or Edinburgh for the tourists and VERY cheap, both in terms of accommodation, food and drink.
Was really great to meet so many of those who turned up, even if I just did meet the people who met the bar entry requirements. Apologies if I was outspoken to anyone. I have only one excuse, and that's that I was very, very drunk.
