(n+1)thing the coach. It makes no sense to come into London or Reading, and the coach will be quite a lot cheaper, not to mention avoiding the hassle of wrangling luggage between trains. Coaches leave from the central bus station at Heathrow Terminal 1/3. There’s a free transfer service between all terminals on the Heathrow Express/Heathrow Connect train services. You just go down to the Express/Connect platform and get on; no ticket to buy.
Coaches leave Heathrow for Oxford at 20 minutes and 50 minutes past the hour, all day, so even if you miss one you only have to wait 30 minutes. You can book online with a credit card (unfortunately not Amex) at www.nationalexpress.com, and a one-way ticket will be £21 (about $30 these days, I think). Well, you said you wanted details…
Oxford’s a lovely place; I hope she enjoys herself!
FWIW I took at National Express bus from Heathrow to Brighton last year and had no trouble paying with a non chip-and-pin Visa card. I might do it again next week, unless I can get a ride instead!
I may have to keep everyone posted on her further adventures. She leaves on Wednesday next and is writing a travel blog. It’s very exciting for her and reminds me of my own experience picking up and moving to New York when I was 17. Although I had a friend in the city to show me the ropes, I didn’t have the advantage of the Dope community. Sincere thanks to all who have shared with a longtime lurker and n00b poster. My virgin thread!
Definitely the bus - the train station in Oxford is a pain in the arse. It’s easy to get from the bus to Hertford. The bus is also MUCH cheaper, and actually significantly faster.
I spent 7 years in Oxford, 4 of them as a student. If you (or her) need any advice or pub recommendations, feel free to send me a private message. Though I am sure there are people of more recent vintage around than me.
Congratulations by the way on raising a daughter who is obviously not only bright but also has impeccable taste. She has to have a pint at least at the Eagle and Child (Bird and Baby, Fowl & Fetus) where Tolkien wrote a lot of his stuff. I wouldn’t recommend she takes a tour - most of the tour guides make everything up as they go along, and Oxford is very much a self explore city.
I’ll be only the latest to extol the bus, which is both faster and cheaper than the train. Just make sure your daughter doesn’t do what I did more than once on the Heathrow Express, which was to fall asleep on the bus due to jet lag and get woken up by the bus driver shouting at me.
There have to be one or two Tolkien experts around who could at least talk to your daughter about her thesis, even if they don’t have the time to work with her long-term. I’m sure my ex-wife (now a tutor at St. Anne’s) would know who they were, but for rather obvious reasons I’m not in contact with her anymore. But if you want her name, send me a PM, she’s easy enough to find, and she would love to help.
Among other things, she can attend Oxonmoot, which is held every year on the weekend nearest Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday. Lots of chances to see many Tolkien-related things in Oxford and meet other Tolkien fans. She’ll be able to attend the reception held at Priscilla Tolkien’s house. (That’s Tolkien’s daughter.)
I recommend that she get in contact with the Oxford Tolkien Society (one of the Student Societies of the University). That will give her a way to meet local students with a common interest, and probably get her some nice personal tours too! There won’t be too many undergraduates around when she arrives – Hilary Term doesn’t start until April 25th – but she might find some graduate students and senior members who will be willing to met for a chat until things start up again. One of their Webpages, Tolkien’s Oxford, is “a set of photos of places in Oxford associated with the life of J.R.R. Tolkien”, so she can track those down by herself (although some of them, like JRRT’s gravesite, are outside of Oxford proper).
If she were going to be staying through September, she could attend the (worldwide) Tolkien Society’s annual Oxonmoot. [Edit: I now see that Wendell Wagner beat me to this.]
From what you’ve said about her, I suspect that she will find herself completely in her element in Oxford. There’s something about the place that inspired Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and more recently Philip Pullman to create their imagined fantasy worlds while surrounded by one of the planet’s great real-life fantasy worlds.
I agree with villa about most of the tour guides making stuff up; this is especially bad with the tour guides who arrive with tourist coaches doing the London - Oxford - Stratford-upon-Avon tourist run. All of central Oxford is extremely walkable – she might want to get a bike to go exploring a bit further afield, but people have been known to spend several months without venturing more than a mile from one of the centrally-located colleges (like Hertford)!
In fact, you can’t drive a car in the central parts of Oxford. That’s partly why it has so many buses. I sometimes suspect that Oxford is the most bus-choked city in the world.
She probably currently pronounces the name of the city “Ahksfarrrd”. Depending on the circles with whom she hangs out while there, she may return home to you talking about “Awwksfud” (in which the u is a schwa).
I’m late to the thread but will reiterate, definitely take the coach. I do this journey all the time and the coach is very convenient, and while slightly overpriced, not that bad really. It takes about 75 minutes.
As far as I can tell I’m the only Oxford resident to have posted to this thread so far, so La Beldame, if you want to give her the contact details of a go-to person in the city - if she should ever need any advice about anything, or an emergency number to call - PM me and I’ll send you my mobile number.
Not all tour guides! Miss Marcus has just applied to work the summer holidays as a guide on the open top tour buses that trundle round the city and she has to actually learn a whole raft of dates and names about the colleges etc. (Seems to be studying these more than her own college work :dubious: )
**jjimm **has got in before me (and he is actually in Oxford, I’m a few miles south) but if we can help in a emergency get in touch via PM.
Then they have improved. My final year I had a room looking out over Broad Street (Exeter College), and the open topped buses stopped pretty much under my window. I heard the same snippet of commentary every 20 minutes all day when I had my window open, and half of it was total fabrication. I even heard them refer to Jesus College as part of the university!
Well if you want to be “accurate” or “truthful,” Jesus College is part of the University.
Those of us privileged enough to be educated on the other side of the Turl, at Exeter know really it is a remedial learning center for sexually deviant Welsh people.
