Am I Twirly...?

The "Walk & Ride" bus service operates between
the Cathedral Quarter and the Commercial Quarter

This little bus stops at the West Front of the Cathedral, then winds around Bailgate before trundling down to the Commercial Quarter and the Railway Station, conveniently stopping by the Age Concern Day Centre along the way, for the benefit of its average passenger, though I don't consider myself qualified for that venue quite yet.
The logical rationale for this service would not be as a taxi service to the Day Centre, but more to  provide a "Park & Ride" service for visitors, with several stops around the Cathedral Quarter and at the Drop-Off points for tourist coaches. I am still baffled by the name of the service: "Walk & Ride," as distinct from the more usual "Park & Ride," but the little bus does provide a useful shuttle by linking Uphill Lincoln with Downhill Lincoln - the two distinct zones I wrote about in  my last post. Maybe that's the clue; they expect you to walk down the hill and ride back up afterwards, - or maybe vice-versa.
After a few weeks, I found other bus stops and other services that took me to the Central Bus Station rather than around the shopping centres, - and then I found an intriguing website that truly extended my horizons. 

http://www.transportdirect.info

Transportdirect is a website for anoraks like me, who happily drool over reading timetables. I have travelled since I was a teenager, and wherever I went, I picked up whatever information was available. At one stage I had a whole shelf of box-files, each labelled for a different part of the world, and each holding travel and tourism literature from cities and towns all around the world. I could look up the timetables and prices for Post-bus services between remote villages in the Austrian Alps, give you the opening hours of a visitor centre at a renowned vineyard in Cape Province, South Africa, or let you browse over the street plan of a small town in southern India. Discovering Transportdirect opened up a new world of travel possibilities. IKEA would no longer be exclusively for car-owners; the bracing breezes of Skegness could be accessible if I longed for the lonely sea and the sky, and I could hope onto a bus to the Nature Parks around the fringes of the city and join the Eastern European Lincolnites to forage for wild mushrooms.

Transportdirect will tell you how to get from anywhere to anywhere else around the UK, by public transport. You put in the postcode of where you are, the postcode of where you want to go and the date and time you want to travel.... and click the mouse. There is an immediate schedule of times of trains and buses, with maps to show the locations of the stops. I almost resented how easy it became, and missed the wizardry of having to learn to read the rubric and the legend of good, old-fashioned maps and timetables. 

The English Pensioner's Bus Pass

With a Senior Railcard in one hand and a Bus Pass in the other, I could afford to go almost anywhere. 
Of the two, I'd been using the Railcard for years, but the Bus Pass had sat untouched in an old wallet. I had a hang-up about free travel, and while I was perfectly happy to pay the Railways an annual premium for a card that would then give me a substantial discount on rail fares, I was less comfortable with a bus pass that meant I wouldn't have to pay anything. 
Carrying a bus pass felt like claiming a benefit to which I wasn't morally entitled. I felt like a scrounger. Unlike with the Senior Railcard, I hadn't paid for it, and I was uncomfortable using it. I was afraid I might misuse it and be accused of attempted fraud, or commit some other misdemeanour,  like the time I left my railcard in the car at the station car-park and was subsequently severely reprimanded by the on-board  ticket inspector. I only escaped a fine when I produced my Italian Identity Card and pleaded I had been living abroad - a totally irrelevant excuse, but he took pity on me. 
Needs must, so it was only a matter of days before I plucked up the courage to lose my Bus Pass virginity. I learnt that some buses wanted only to see my pass and other buses wanted me to put the card on a card-reader and then issue me with a blank ticket. On one occasion, my heart missed a beat when the card reader declared my pass invalid, but I learnt to spit-and-polish the magnetic strip and magically rejuvenate its validity in line with the printed date on the face of the card.

Throughout Lincolnshire the bus pass is valid from first thing in the morning. It's not like London, where the pass isn't valid till after the rush hour.  Down South, as each bus arrives at the stop, the cry goes up from the waiting pensioners..."Am I too early?"  The nickname stuck.

I've now completed my  bus pass apprenticeship.

Now I'm a Twirly, too.