Journal · eight minutes
The last bus is part of the route
A walk does not end at the summit, or even at the pub. It ends when you are home, and the timetable is as much a part of the map as the contour lines.
The day it went wrong
The plan was sound. Twenty-two kilometres, nine hundred metres of climb, a pace we had walked a hundred times, and a bus from the far valley at ten past five. What the plan did not have was the ten past five bus, which had been the ten past four since the spring timetable, and which we watched from the top of the last descent as a small white rectangle leaving without us.
The taxi cost more than the boots. That is the whole story, and it is the reason this app has a bus line on every plan it makes, drawn from the operator's own timetable and refreshed the night before.
What a plan actually is
A plan is a line on a map plus four numbers. The line is the easy part; every app draws one. The numbers are distance, climb, daylight and the last bus, and the fourth is the one that decides whether the other three matter. A walk you cannot get home from is not a walk, it is a night out.
So the bus is not an extra. It is the constraint the rest is solved against. Summit reads the timetable first and works backwards: the last bus, the one before it as a spare, then the pace, then the daylight, then the hour you have to leave the car park to make it all fit. If the answer is "you cannot", it says so before you have laced up.
Every walk has a hard end. Better to know it at breakfast than at the bus stop.
Reading a timetable like a walker
Operators write timetables for people going to work. A walker reads them backwards, from the end of the day, and cares about three things: the last service, the one before it, and whether either runs on the day in question, which on a bank holiday is a different question entirely.
So each plan shows the last two services from the end of the walk, for that date, with the walking time from the summit to the stop worked out at your pace and not a stranger's. When the spare is the one you catch, the plan still worked.
The rule we walk by
Leave the summit when the plan says, not when the view says. The view will be there next time; the bus will not.
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