Coach Driving
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Having obtained a licence I asked the coach operator if I could hire one for a fortnight to take a group of friends toVienna. They were a bit startled as no one had asked such an odd question before. However, we made a deal when I offered to take another driver and train him to get through Customs and accompany me with a second coach for the 106 people who had by now shown an interest in our adventure.
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We drove to Dover where I had booked on a ferry for Dunkirk. In those days the Dunkirk ferries carried rail tracks to offload train wagons! The snag was that you had to wait in a dock for the water level to be raised to enable the rails to meet; that took ages. Eventually we were on our way towards Paris and stopped for 106 cups of coffee in Beauvais, about half way. As Glyn pulled in behind me I noticed water leaking from beneath his coach. We tried to get the local Citroen dealer to make a repair, but this was not possible as the water pump had cracked. It was a Saturday afternoon and all the coach mechanics in Pontypridd were down at the Rugby Club.
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There was no alternative than for me to take my passengers to our Paris hotel and then come back for Glyn's people. We felt there was no possibility of getting a Ford water pump quickly, so I hired a Mercedes coach with a French driver, and prayed Glyn would eventually catch up in Innsbrook or Vienna. The coach was magnificent: shiny, new and comfortable. We drove for the next day towards Innsbrook and on catching up in a village we noticed the passengers on the right of the Mercedes coach had umbrellas up, and those on the left didn't. At first we thought they were using them as parasols, but when we stopped we heard that their air-conditioning was dripping icy water along the whole of the coach from the parcel rack.
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There was much cheering when Glyn walked into the Innsbrook hotel at 8 p.m. He'd found his way to Paris, round the Périphérique for the first time in his life, and even found the correct exit towards Innsbrook. We journeyed on to Vienna and returned via the Rhine with no further mishaps.
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My next coach trip was to take a church party to Oberammergau in 1984. That was just one coach, not two. But even then you have to plan it well so that coach door arrives at the pavement of each hotel and does not disgorge passengers into the middle of the high street of a foreign country. Lastly, and this was the end of coaching, I took a choir of fifty to visit the Royal School of Church Music in Croydon.