Mainland Trip Memoirs

Part 1: Landing in London 
 
  I am sitting in a house in London.  I am sitting in London.  I am in London!  This is the city of legends, and we have now walked its streets - some of them, anyway.  Our travel here was anything but luxurious, and I should begin telling that tale of horror first. 
  When Ben and I started looking at transportation options down to London, we knew our choices would be narrowed for us by price.  Flights were out of the question, especially since Ryanair charges more for any luggage larger than the size of a grape than they probably pay their pilots.  The rumor is that they're going to start charging passengers to use the toilets on board, too.  I believe this will quite possibly result in damp carpets...or an overwhelming increase in Depends adult diapers sales.  Back to our expensive travel predicament, though, we closed the airline webpages with preconceived disappointment and opened another for the railway option.  The Caledonian sleeper train went first.  The dream of stretching ourselves out flat and having some privacy flew out of reach on little fluttery wings.  Comfort was quickly creeping away from us.  One by one, all of the other rail options melted away with the price results.  We had waited too long to search.  The next click was simply depressing.  We went from the sky to the high speed tracks to the grinding road.  Buses: fine for short journeys, bearable for a tad longer ones, TERRIBLE for long ones.  Glasgow to London is excrutiatingly endless.  The cheapest option was not a comfortable bus, either.  The busline whose price rang "dingdingding" with the sound of a B-rated horror film's theme tune was none other than Megabus.
  For those unfamiliar with the infamous Megabus, it is the cheapest mode of coach transportation in Britain, and you definitely get what you pay for.  In order to have leg room aplenty, you would have to gnaw your own legs off...or reach the emergency exit row before your fellow travellers, but either option probably involves growling and biting.  The seat-backs have never known the function of 'reclining', and passengers are, therefore, crammed perpetually into a gut-squishing, bum-falling-asleep, fearfully blood-clot-inducing, impossible-to-sleep position.  Tack on a nine-hour journey on one of these vehicles, plus a 50-to-1 ratio of passengers to malfunctioning toilets, and you can begin to get a visual (and olfactory) image of our bus trip.