Less than a week to go and...

.
I bottled out today.

The train tickets I booked a month or so ago were from Oxford to Penzance with a change at Reading. The change, at only 7 minutes,was pretty tight and I've always been a bit worried about the lack of time to get two heavily laden bikes from one platform to another via stairs (perhaps), a bridge (perhaps), other obstacles (perhaps) on what I seem to recall from one visit a few years ago is a large station.

I'd done lots of research, trying to find out which platform the train would arrive at and depart from (once again frustrated by the lack of information avialble... but don't get me started!) and am very grateful to Martin Joyce who drew a plan of the platform layout... but... today I asked Birg to drive us to Reading rather than Oxford: it was always going to be pushing it, if the first train was delayed by only a minute or two it would have been a real problem, we'd have had to wait 2 hours for the next train and had to pay full, on the day, price for the tickets so... good old Birg... Reading it is please dear.