Trying to get home from Birmingham is more difficult than it at first may seem...
It was a warm summer's evening in the Midlands, and a few mates and I had been on a pub crawl in Birmingham for my birthday. Most of us being a little the worse for wear after the 8 million or so units of alcohol we had collectively consumed, around 10.30 we decide that perhaps it might be an idea to find out when the last train back to Worcester leaves, so we despatch a team to find out the train times, while we go and buy some beer to make the train journey back more enjoyable (from Marks and Spencers no less, as it was the only place selling beer to take away we could find).

On their return our recon team have two lots of bad news - firstly that we have to walk to Moor Street station to get the train (and no-one knows where the fuck that is), and also that we have to get a bus at Stourbridge back to Worcester. It wasn't necessarily going to ruin the evening, but these were the first warning signs that a journey that is supposed to take a maximum of 45 minutes could take rather longer.

After being accosted by a drunken port-swilling tramp who quizzed us on Geography ("What's the capital of London??") and actually as it turns out losing this quiz (our drunken minds thought the capital of Israel was Tel-Aviv, kudos to tramp for setting us straight on that one) we got on the train. Most of this journey was spent drinking the aforementioned beer, and calling our other friend to keep him awake and give him a mission to find out where we could buy more alcohol when we finally got back. This continued on the bus.

All was well until the bus stopped and dropped us off. now we were fairly drunk by this point but even our alcohol-soaked brains could tell that we were not in Worcester, no, the bastards had dropped us off in Droitwich of all places as "they had used all their driving hours up" - they didn't tell us how they were managing to drive themselves home without using any hours, some sort of time machine rigged up in the luggage section i imagine, but they assured us a taxi would pick us up.

20 minutes later and a taxi picks up some of the people from the bus, another 20 minutes and another taxi turns up. There are 6 of us, and only 5 spaces in the taxi, so we send off half our party (with my other half, and instructions to get in supplies in time for our return), and gallantly wait in the cold for the nxt taxi to arrive.

And wait some more.
And some more.

After entertaining ourselves for a while by drawing a mural of the two towers getting hit by a plane in the condensation on a nearby car, i decide to find out where our taxi is as it is now approaching 2 in the morning. I won't go into details but I'll just say I'm sorry to the people working the late shift at National Rail Enquiries, while not the most helpful of call centre staff, they probably didn't deserve the abuse hurled their way that night and we did eventually get our taxi.

At almost 3am we rounded off the evening by drinking half a bottle of rum and pretending to be Pirates by shouting "aaargh" before downing each shot.

Apologies for length, but i wanted to make the story as pointlessly long-winded as our 4-hour train, bus and taxi journey of approximately 30 miles...
(caitlinbree, Fri 8 Sep 2006, 15:30, Reply)