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What's your preferred mode of travel - surface or air?

What do you like/dislike about it?

I've done a fair bit of air travel mostly for work during 2008/9/10. All domestic travel bar two overseas trips by myself in the mid-1990's.

I don't like air travel though and much prefer to stay on the ground. I'm not a fan of water travel though I've hardly done any.

I've never worked in aviation or marine industries.
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ArishMell · 70-79, M
Surface.

I have flown but only a few times. Only once abroad, for a holiday in Greece (I think a four-hour flight each way) and half a dozen times with the UK for work trips.

I enjoyed the flights themselves but air travel is cumbersome. Using short internal flights takes a lot longer than the one hour actually in the air. It might not have taken much longer to have driven there!

Many of my local journeys now are by bus; longer ones by either train or own car.

I have used the ferries across the Irish Sea, English Channel and North Sea on a total of maybe twenty holidays. One Channel return crossing was by hovercraft but that service ended years ago. I have not used the Channel Tunnel, which is by train that carries cars on special wagons.

The North Sea crossings were enjoyable. Taking 24 hours each way, the ship cruised directly from Newcastle to Bergen but the return followed the Norwegian coast southwards to Stavanger thence overnight to Newcastle.

......

I was trying to recall how long those domestic flight journeys took.

Hire-car from work-place to airport: about 2 to 3 hours depending on the airport used.

Booking-in time, hire-car to aircraft: typically 2 hours.

Flight: 1 hr

Destination stage: aircraft door via baggage-collection and hire-car collection to hotel: say 2hr.

So 7-8 hours. Driving from "office" to hotel: probably 10 hrs, but that does assume a clear run; not guaranteed on the very busy motorways. By train would have taken a similar time, perhaps an hour or so longer, due to a rather indirect route and still needing reach the stations. At least there is far less faff than by air; with no booking-in an hour and a half before departure time.