A straw poll of Sunday Times writers suggested that the absolute limit falls somewhere around Tuscany. But straw polls are no substitute for hard evidence. And so it was that at 11am on a showery Sunday, three journalists lined up at the foot of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. To simulate an authentically bulky holiday-luggage load, we handicapped each one with a guitar. Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.
At the last distant bong of Big Ben, they were off. One made for the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo. Another headed for the Tube, on a circuitous route to Stansted airport. The third sauntered to his motor. Their ultimate destination, though, was the same: Villa Sughera, just south of Pisa.
This was a race with a difference. It wasn’t only about speed. We wanted to weigh up a range of factors — including price, stress and enjoyment — to decide whether planes, trains or automobiles were the all-round best bet for the journey. Here’s how we did.
11AM
Advertisement
Simon Hacker — car: the Volvo V70 diesel has acres of space, so Jenny and I have lobbed in just three huge cases, sundry comestibles, 50 CDs, a boules set and half a yard of literature. Oh, and the guitar.
The GPS man trapped in the dashboard indicates it’s 460 miles to Beaune, our Burgundy pit stop. Nevertheless, his first advice is a touch unhelpful: “There is a traffic problem ahead. There are no alternatives.” Fifteen minutes after waving those suckers goodbye, we’re somehow still within arrow-shot of Eros.
Tim Moore — train: my Eurostar doesn’t leave for two hours, but it’s raining, and with my right arm being slowly lengthened by two stone of flight-cased Fender Bullet, I opt to check in early at Waterloo. Plenty of time to recall that the last time I took a guitar abroad, it earned me a lingering strip-search at Oslo airport.
Advertisement
Stephen Bleach — plane: there’s a 1.30pm flight from Gatwick to Florence, but I’m not going to take it. This is because I have a cunning plan. I’m clearly going to win hands down on time, anyway. I’d like to win on price, too. The Gatwick flight is £160 return — but Ryanair has an 8.15pm from Stansted to Pisa that I’ve bagged for a mere 60 quid. My skinflint soul aglow, I set off to fritter away a few hours in the capital. Brunch, then Tate Modern, I think.
2PM
Car: having eventually scraped London off our tyres, there’s a delay at Eurotunnel’s check-in thanks to a woman who’s there to explain the new delay-reducing, self-service system. It’s all so exciting, I forget to change any currency, forcing us into a euro-hunting detour to the execrable plasticity of the Cité de l’Europe.
Advertisement
Train: we’re reeling in a rain-smeared Pas-de- Calais, drops clattering the windows at 186mph. My Ryanair rival is probably on the Stansted Express, crawling north when I’m barrelling south, and who’d want to drive in this? Time to toast my competitive advantage with a beer.
Plane: Tate Modern’s awfully big, isn’t it? Still, at least they let me leave the guitar at the coat check. It seems Moholy-Nagy’s contribution to constructivism was primarily pedagogic. I feel better for knowing that.
Advertisement
5PM
Car: our itinerary has assumed la forme de la poire. Already christened Marvin, our robo-guide has routed us southwest, via Paris, instead of southeast, via Dijon, thus saving about 100 metres as the crow flies while piling on a miserable camion-clogged hour as the tourist flaps.
Train: with frankly sickening efficiency, the Métro whisks me across Paris to arrive at the obscure terminus of Bercy an hour early. Unfortunately, Bercy turns out to be the savvy French tramp’s best-kept secret. On a wet Sunday evening, killing an hour here is going to involve a rather slow death.
Advertisement
Plane: the Tube and big baggage aren’t a good mix. There’s a scary moment on the Victoria line when I whack a skinhead’s bristly pate with the guitar and get his toes with the wheelie case simultaneously. This is quite funny to look at but, he assures me with a volley of expletives, annoying to experience.
7PM
Car: with no gaps to mind or duty-free trollies to negotiate, I’m pulling on the handbrake under our hotel’s window boxes with enough spare time to enjoy the birdsong in the courtyard, shower, dress for (three-course) dinner and wander around Beaune’s cobbled medieval streets. We’ve been car-bound for eight hours, averaging a reptilian 56mph, but we’ve given France a hearty embrace, if not an intimate fondle.
Train: fighting through a miasma of carbolic and salami, I find my way to the modest compartment that is home to couchette 56. Rather disheartening to find it’s also home to four genteel Frenchwomen, clutching Florence guidebooks. If I’m twice too old for this sort of thing, they’re the wrong side of thrice. “C’est très... rustique ici,” smiles one of the Golden Girls bravely.
We creak and dawdle through the countryside. The maps I’ve brought along to plot our progress don’t make it out of the bag: there’s hardly room to read a paperback without having someone’s eye out. After the 21st-century rail experience that was Eurostar, I’ve gone back to the 19th.
Plane: I hit the check-in queue nice and early... and there I stay. It takes half an hour to reach the desk, giving me time to observe that Stansted is a truly ghastly place: it’s the zombie-movie lighting that does it, making us look like a long line of unemployed undead in some netherworld dole queue. I work out that I’m currently travelling north at a speed of 0.0568mph. I can almost hear Simon and Tim snickering.
9PM
Car: Beaune’s really very pretty, and they certainly know how to do a soufflé. Wonder what the others are getting to eat?
Train: I retreat from couchette 56 to the dining car, and in seconds I’m at a table with a half bottle of Chianti and an elderly American couple. The kitchen handsomely outperforms its mobile British counterparts. Forking up rocket and entrecôte, my cultured companions and I exchange pleasant traveller’s banter and e-mail addresses as we watch rural France turning in for the night. Ah, this is so much more like it: a proper journey, passing through countries, not over them, and striking up friendships en route. Aesthetically — and perhaps, for a brief moment, geographically — I’m out in front.
Plane: “THE PLANE WILL NOT WAIT”, says the boarding card in stern red capitals, but security takes 40 increasingly stressful minutes, and I arrive panting at the gate only just in time.
And again, there I stay: we finally take off 30 minutes late. Still, somewhere over eastern France, I think I have finally gained my rightful place: the lead. A Pyrrhic victory, maybe — as Simon and Tim are presumably snoozing peacefully, I am crammed into a tatty 737 — but I have a sachet of gin (£3.60) to celebrate.
Continued on page 2
()
11PM
Car: zzzzzzzz...
Train: stumbling back after our sole French stop at Dijon, I find the corridor dense with priests. Should this be reassuring or alarming? At the compartment, a stocky, vested Italian has been billeted to our final berth. Evidently a night-train regular, he converts our two seats into six bunks with swift and practised brutality, then clambers up the ladder and flops sockless on a top bunk. Horrible parts of him hang uncomfortably over the edge.
I haul myself up the ladder to the other top bunk as the lights go out, and a voice calls “Bonne nuit”. Like Gallic Waltons, we all reply in kind. You just don’t get that kind of camaraderie on a plane, unless it comes down in the jungle.
Plane: the flight is grim but mercifully brief, the hire car’s waiting and by 12.30am I’m at La Sughera. It’s gorgeous, all brick floors, colossal oak beams and peace. And there’s a bottle of wine on the sideboard. How very civilised.
1AM
Car: zzzzzzzz...
Train: it’s sweltering, the ventilation doesn’t work, and if I take off much more than I already have, there’s going to be a well-manicured female hand on the emergency handle. Plus, the bunk is a cramp-inducing inch too short.
The train eases to the first of many long, ruminative pauses in the blackness. I picture the driver stepping out to savour the moonlit majesty of the Alps, then falling down a well. The snoring builds to a climax of phlegmy, bestial snorts. It’s the low point. On the Express scale, this is less Orient than Midnight.
Plane: will you look at that — the bottle’s empty. Must be time for bed.
6AM
Car: that sounds like the dawn chorus. Time for petit déjeuner, I think.
Train: the conductor raps a brutal reveille on our door. “Firenze!” he barks. There’s no soap or paper towels left in the loo, and the sanitary ware has taken a fearful priest-bashing overnight. I remain unwashed. Banging my Fender case down the corridor like a drunk with a ladder, I step out onto the sunlit but very lonely platform of some forsaken station out near the football stadium. “Au revoir,” calls a Golden Girl from the station exit. “C’était... originale!” One vast coffee and a bus ride later, I’m downtown picking up a hire car. If I don’t have a shower and a change of clothes soon, someone’s going to suffer. Someone with a Ryanair boarding pass and a stupid, smug smile.
Plane: that sounds like the dawn chorus. Time for prima colazione, I think.
10AM
Car: if yesterday was our touring hors d’oeuvre, today’s the main, 503-mile course. Like a gently building symphony, the A40 from Macon slinks under Switzerland’s belly, from gentle pastoral undulation to dirty-great snow-topped mountains. We stop on Mont Blanc’s flanks, and there’s a tingle in the Alpine air. Why rush to get there when arriving’s this pleasant?
Train: with the road surface beginning to undulate in my fatigue-raddled field of vision, I come to a halt at the end of a poplar-lined Tuscan drive. An hour later, couchette 56 already seems a distant half-memory. I’m a living tribute to the healing power of hot water, cold beer and slack-faced poolside lolling.
Plane: Tim did look a little scary when he arrived, and he smelt interesting, too. But then he’s had a Travel Experience, while I’ve had a sachet
of Ryanair gin.
12PM
Car: the autostrada leads us from Mont Blanc’s tunnel onto a route studded with mountaintop castles, ancient vineyards and crumbling monasteries. It’s a delicious welcome to Italy, but the needle of our growing smugness is soon to be brutally ripped across the LP of our perfect itinerary.
Next, you see, we have to negotiate Genoa — the tarmac equivalent of rounding Cape Horn. On a bin lid. Even in a nice, safe Volvo, this contorted leg of our route, stuffed with a strobe-effect succession of tunnels, soon has my fingernails cuticle-deep in the steering wheel.
Train: top-notch extra-virgin here, and tomatoes you can actually taste. Time for a picnic in the olive groves.
Plane: this estate produces 150,000 bottles of wine a year, apparently. Rude not to try a few more. Where’s the corkscrew?
3PM
Car: somewhere towards Pisa we’re spat out into relative autostrada calm (“Give an Italian a German car” being our new catch phrase), but — with the help of a 45-minute dispute with Marvin, who attempts to guide us to the poolside via Timbuktu — there’s a further two hours of tailgate terrorism and pothole-sampling to go.
Train: comfy sunloungers, these. Do you think Simon’s all right?
Plane: probably. Pass the bottle.
5PM
Car: we hadn’t expected bunting, but it’s a blow to find my “colleagues” sozzled, sunburnt and snoring. We spent eight hours seat-shaped for this?
SO WHICH WAY IS BEST?
PRICE
Plane: £191 return, for flight, Stansted Express and a week’s car hire.
Train: £207 return, for Eurostar, sleeper train and a week’s car hire.
Car: a whacking £526 return, with petrol and tolls. But that’s for two. Or three. Or four.
SPEED
Plane: 7hr 41min from Tube to door.
Train: 18hr 5min from Waterloo to villa.
Car: about 30hr altogether; 16 in-car.
ENJOYMENT
Plane: going no-frills? There wasn’t any.
Train: loved the dining car. But, oh, that couchette...
Car: a frisson in the Alps, exhaustion around Genoa. We’d drive again, but we’d want another day.
SO, HOW SHOULD YOU GO?
For three, four or more, driving can be cheaper and you can pack lots of luggage, too. But break the journey twice, so it’s less of a dash and more of a holiday.
As an experience, the train wins hands down. Couchettes can be rough, though: splash out on a wagon-lit.
Predictably, the plane wins on speed. In our test it was the cheapest, too — though we did get a bargain. It’s pretty soulless, but if you just want to get there, it does the business.
Three-bedroom villas at La Sughera are available through Tuscan Holidays (01539 431120, www.tuscanholidays.co.uk) from £539. Book trains with Rail Europe (0870 837 1371, www.raileurope.co.uk)