Tuesday, August 22, 2006

TOTP - Top Ten Things Which Always Happen On A Coach

Thanks to Dettie for the contents of todays show about coach travel:-

  • 10 - Maps
  • 9 - Baby
  • 8 - Phones
  • 7 - Toilet
  • 6 - Drivers
  • 5 - MP3 dead
  • 4 - Waking up
  • 3 - Talk to driver
  • 2 - Service stop
  • 1 - Sick

Keep those emails coming in to topofthepods@gmail.com.

14 comments:

bryan-in-greece said...

Great list, Dettie - I have done my fair share of coach travel (unlike Jon, it seems!) and have a few coach anecdotes, but possibly the worst happened in August 1986. I set off from Darlington (northern England) on the National Express down to London and then took the Euroways coach to Thessaloniki in Greece, a journey which took a total of some 68 hours, London - Dover - Cologne - Stuttgart - Zagreb - Belgrade - Nis - Skopje - Thessaloniki. Living north of Thessaloniki, I took that London - Thessaloniki coach 7 times in all before moving on to air travel, which works out at a total of two-and-a-half weeks on a coach across Europe. I realised the time had come to start going by plane when I began recognising individual houses outside Belgrade... :-)

Anyway, back to the anecdote. I found myself sitting on the back seat of the top deck of a National Express coach from Darlington to London, sitting next to a girl of about twlve and her older sister. In front there was an annoying old woman who was talking loudly to anyone whose ear she thought was turned her way, a real pain she was. Every so often she would delve into her bag in the aisle and pull out a sandwich and chomp away on it. Now the top deck rear seat is one of the bumpiest places to sit in a bus, and suddenly the girl sitting next to me turned to her sister and said "I don't feel very well" before vomiting violently forward, all over my trousers... So there I was with a stomachful of diced carrots all over my strides at the beginning of a 3-day coach trip across Europe in summer temperatures... The beauty of the whole thing, though, was that the majority of the puke went straight into the old woman's lunch bag, rendering her picnic totally inedible, and we didn't hear a squeak out of her for the rest of the journey.

Every cloud has a silver lining...

Anonymous said...

WHAT A SHOW U GUYS R DA BEST!!!!!!!

YES 2ND COMMENT!!!!!

Top Of The Pods said...

Hang on a minute Robbo.... How the hell is a solio going to charge your ipod when sleeping? Ok, so you go to bed listening to the old ipod and plug it in to the solio so the battery doesn't run out. Then in the morning rob, you wake up and wonder why it is dead.

Robbo. THERE IS NO LIGHT AT NIGHT. NO SUN. WHAT HELP IS A STUPID SOLIO? Dong.

Jonathan

bryan-in-greece said...

Jon, I think Solios can hold the charge within them and you can use them like a battery pack to charge an iPod etc from at a later, sunless stage... I may be wrong on that, but that is the impression I got. My iRiver can do the same from a clip-on battery pack.

alex said...

Just to say another grate show and allso loveing totpg thats like haveing a show every day. And those soli things do store the charge in em so they can be left in the coach window all day while ur waiting for people at service stops you didnt need or when your traveing to pick up some pentioner from some roundabout on the a1 and then be full of charge to charge an ipod at night. That or get a music pol;ayer that takes rechagable aa baterys then you can just carry a few of them and get 6-8 hours out of each.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Luna could write a top ten. Perhaps top ten dodgy movies.

Anonymous said...

Hi its dettie! yep it is a girls name! and we had drinks on the coch because it was a coach tour holiday. and yep a service stop is where you stop at services!
dettie

Anonymous said...

i've had some disturbing expieriences, too. i remember one trip in particular. there was a certain teenage girl who could talk like no one i've ever seen. almost literally, she could talk constantly. on top of that, she was incredibly loud. it was a week-long tour, driving around in a few states. i never sat anywhere near her, but i learned more than i could ever want about her life. it was horrible. we were plotting to lock her in the storage compartments underneath the floor by the end of the trip.

Anonymous said...

Good, show, very funny but Rob seems to of spent way much time watching old people pee on toilets

Anonymous said...

This is just a quick message to say (seen as we're always propted to write something on these comment pages) :) that you know, you guys rock and probably should be employed/sponsored full time to do this :).

I don't think any of the episodes recently have been bad, what were you talking about? (not this episode - two episodes ago?) I love the variation between the extremely funny episodes (this one) and the serious ones :).

Also, I've been listening for quite a while now, but some of those gold podcasts are top class :). Keep it up!

Cheers!
Phil (the guy uh, reponsible for the rap :).)

Anonymous said...

Hi Jon and Rob - great show today, well funny. Just thought I'd let you know that you guys are going to be the 'banter' that my brother misses so much living in Peru, where the language barrier hasn't broken down sufficiently yet to allow this sort of exchange (it has broken down sufficiently for him to get a wife and child, but that's another story...)
Cheers, Ears

Kate x

Anonymous said...

I find that even when they don't do a show for a weeks

even though I subscribe on iTunes and it will download automatically

I still check this homepage about ten times a day.

I think I have a problem.

hope you guys are having a good week and that you have podding time soon (no, not pudding time rob).

Anonymous said...

Great shows guys, I was just looking at your statistics map to see where you are listened to. Is it weird to know that people (just to name a few) in the middle of the amazon, the edge of the hudson bay, egypt, an island off the coast of madagascar and even wales listen to you two?

Amazing. Keep it up.

Anonymous said...

Why did'nt you mention stressy buss drivers as when ever i travail by coach or buss the driver has a massive stress atack at me. Or maybe i'm just annoying. Love the show and keep up the god work.
P.S I hope to send in a top ten list of my own soon.