bus

IS there anything more traditionally British than a big double-decker bus?

The Original London Bus Tour offer tours around the capital in classic, open-top buses – and there are some major savings to be had this summer.

Claim 25% off kids tickets for the The Original London Kids Tour

Families looking for an exciting day out in London can save 25% on children’s tickets for The Original Tour’s guided Kids Tour of London, with kids under 2 going free.

The tour is the only one of its kind, as the only live guided London bus tour that is catered specifically to kids.

Families can learn all about London from an enthusiastic tour guide on a 45 minute-long trip around the city.

The route will help you tick off all the major London sights, without the faff of hopping on and off the busy underground or walking long routes that are tiresome for little legs.

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Simply sit back and relax on the open-top bus, where you are guaranteed a top deck seat.

You’ll cruise past landmarks like Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Downing Street, the London Eye and more.

But it’s not only about ticking off all the sights.

With the child-friendly commentary from the live tour guide, you’ll learn all the hidden secrets of London and fascinating facts that will make your day out all the more interesting.

Come September, the kids will have plenty of new knowledge to impress with at school – along with those fond family memories.

As the tour is catered to families, you can expect all the comforts like room to park your pram downstairs, free Wi-Fi, plus you’re allowed to bring snacks onboard.

Claim 25% off kids tickets for the The Original London Kids Tour

The best part? You can also claim seven other freebies as part of the offer.

Your ticket also includes a Hop-On Hop-Off River Thames cruise, where you can soak up the sights from the water.

Plus you’ll get access to six self-guided walking tours via The Original Tour’s partner app.

That’s three ways to see London for the price of one – all of which are kid-friendly, hassle-free and put together by experts.

That way you can put together the perfect family day out in London during the school summer holidays that won’t break the bank.

Tours depart from Charles II Street, beside His Majesty’s Theatre. It’s recommended to arrive at least 10 minutes early, as seats are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

For added flexibility during the summer holidays, you can amend up to 24 hours before departure.

You can book your ticket online or browse other bus tours by clicking the button below.

The 25% off children’s tickets deal is a limited-time offer, and runs over the school summer holidays.

Claim 25% off kids tickets for the The Original London Kids Tour

Travelling on a sleeper bus might not be a comfortable journey, but one woman was pleasantly surprised by her entire experience when she went from Amsterdam to Zurich

We’re always on the lookout for cheap travel, given the fact we’re still in a cost of living crisis. Recently a woman travelled from the UK to Spain without flying and left everyone surprised by the total cost.

Claire’s Footsteps is known for her travel content where she shares low-budget alternatives for holidays. And after she trekked from London to Malaga without stepping foot on a flight, she decided to take things to another level by boarding Europe’s first sleeper bus. Now we know what you’re thinking – a sleeper bus surely can’t be that comfortable, well you’ll be surprised. Claire rode the bus from the Netherlands to Switzerland where she enjoyed complimentary Wi-Fi and a full reclined sleep for a decent snooze.

The traveller recently posted a video on her Instagram and TikTok pages to give viewers a genuine insight into what the trip is really like.

Inside Europe’s First Lie-Flat Sleeper Bus Experience

Travelling from Amsterdam to Zurich overnight can set you back between €29 and €160+ (roughly £25 to £136) per person one-way, depending on your chosen level of comfort.

The direct ÖBB Nightjet (train NJ402/NJ403) leaves Amsterdam Central at around 20:30 and pulls into Zurich HB the following morning at 08:20.

In the clip, she began: “I’m about to take this business class lie flat sleeper bus from Amsterdam to Zurich. This is the Twilighter Europe’s first sleeper bus with seats that you can fully recline and get a good night’s sleep on.”

Describing the journey in detail, Claire continued: “I boarded the coach and we headed south through to Netherlands, I was given a bag with my bedding and had a look at the seat functions which had tray tables and charging facilities.

“Downstairs there’s a toilet and a separate changing room with atmosphere lighting and luxury soap, plus a snack bar with free tea and coffee.

“There is also complimentary Wi-Fi which stayed strong throughout my whole journey. I headed back to my seat to make my bed up for the night, all you need to do here is press two buttons to fully recline.”

Claire finally settled in and stretched out flat on the bus, ready to enjoy a decent night’s sleep. She said your seatbelts must remain fastened through your entire sleep and there’s a bag specifically for your feet to stay secured.

Affordable Eco-Friendly Travel: The Final Verdict

Then after catching up on some sleep, Claire woke up to find herself in Switzerland.

She continued: “I woke up in Switzerland and headed back downstairs to refresh and grab a coffee and all too soon we arrived in Zurich and it was time to disembark.”

Concluding her post, Claire issued an honest verdict about the trip and scored it a 9.5 out of 10.

In the comments section, people rushed to ask her for the guide on the adventure, while others said it was “amazing” and “looked great”.

Someone was intrigued by the bathroom situation as a person queried: “Was the toilet clean and do you have to queue up?” To the person’s surprise, Claire said the loo was spotless with “no queues”.

In terms of the sleeping situation, Claire “slept well throughout”.

Trips to waterfalls, gardens, galleries, medieval forests and prehistoric caves will make the long school holidays a lot more fun. To help families explore affordably, throughout August buses in England will be free for kids and adult fares will be capped at £3 single. Or, if you arrive somewhere by train, you could buy a PlusBus ticket, which include unlimited local bus travel. Here are six ideas for family outings by bus around England.

Great North Museum, Newcastle

Painted mummy cases, fossilised dino teeth, a stuffed wombat, a fake merman … Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock is full of things kids might love – and entrance is free. Some of the impressive Roman altars are lit with colourful projections and there’s a planetarium with shows (from £2.95). This summer’s exhibition Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found (free, until 20 Sept) involves thoughtfully curated shiny stuff, from Roman coins to Viking silver unearthed across northern England. Lots of buses stop nearby, and a bus ticket gets you 10% off in the cafe.

This summer, there’s also a Tales on the Tyne trail across Newcastle of giant Peter Rabbit sculptures and other, smaller “fluffles” to raise funds for St Oswald’s hospice. The waterfront hotel INNSiDE Newcastle, near the station, hosts a Tynetastic Peter sculpture, plus art and reading events. Its riverside restaurant has a bambino menu and under-11s get free meals until 6 September. The hotel offers family-friendly rooms (from £119 for four in August, room-only), activity hampers and a free soft-drink minibar.

In stylish Ouseburn, a short bus ride away, the Biscuit Factory gallery hosts three further fluffles, free kids’ activities, rabbit-themed food and a roof terrace. Bus 306 runs regularly all the way out to Tynemouth for an afternoon on the beach under castle-topped cliffs. Back in the city, the art deco Tyneside cinema has selected films at £5 each week and kids’ classics over the summer.

Forest fun near Hatfield, Essex

Open every day and free to enter, the National Trust’s Hatfield Forest has 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of Frisbee-ready flowering fields and shady woodland. Incongruously close to Stansted airport, the forest was once a royal hunting ground and is still home to hundreds of deer, some descended from Henry I’s original 12th-century herds. You can follow a boardwalk through twisting hornbeams, ramble across buttercup-carpeted meadows, build a den and hear yaffling woodpeckers.

Bus 509 from Bishop’s Stortford stops outside The Green Man, a short walk from the forest’s edge. Briefly follow the road signed Hatfield Forest and turn right up the path just after the bridge to find a map and gateway.

The lakeside picnic tables and alfresco cafe are a delightful mile away, past cattle-grazed pastures busy with butterflies, and 1,000-year-old trees. With no car to get back to (parking costs £9), make this a linear walk. Loop through woods to Thremhall Priory or follow the Three Forests way for 4½ miles to the village of Hatfield Broad Oak and catch bus 305 (not Sundays).

In Bishop’s Stortford itself, there’s a riverside splash pool and playgrounds near the recently revamped castle mound. South Mill arts centre has kids’ crafts for £2 and Much Hadham Forge museum has a free event on 27 August, featuring a Tudor storyteller, to celebrate 450 years since their Elizabethan murals were painted. Half-timbered Much Hadham is 20 minutes from Stortford on hourly bus 35 (not Sundays).

Cave art in Nottinghamshire

The Welbeck Estate’s walking map includes an easy-going, sculpture-dotted trail to Creswell Crags, where a bus ticket gets you free entry to the museum and 10% off in the cafe. A stroll through the limestone gorge is spectacular, past ponds and caves where prehistoric humans lived and left rock art on the walls. Bus 209 from Worksop stops every couple of hours (not Sundays) near the Dukeries garden centre and Welbeck courtyard at the start of the trail.

Welbeck has a free museum and gallery in converted outbuildings. Highlights include the pearl earring Charles I was wearing when he was beheaded and a red chalk Madonna by Michelangelo. The award-winning Harley cafe next door serves local food (kids’ soup £5, cheese on toast £6).

Half-price Harewood, West Yorkshire

Like many big country houses, Harewood usually charges adults well over £20 for a day’s worth of paintings, porcelain and landscaped gardens. But arrive on the frequent bus 36 from Leeds or Harrogate, and you get 50% off walk-up ticket prices. This gives you access to the art-filled house, the Capability Brown parkland and gardens with scented borders, waterfalls and bridges in thickets of bamboo.

For kids, there’s a wooded adventure playground with zipwire and slides, a treehouse and a willow maze. They can also borrow a nature safari bag, complete with map and compass, torch, binoculars and magnifying glass. And the summer holidays are packed with extra offers, all free with a ticket: den-building, gardening, statue-cleaning, dressing up, circus skills, and mid-August workshops by Tibetan monks.

Inside, there’s an exhibition of glamorous photos by Cecil Beaton (until 4 October). Alternatively, a 5-mile circular walk from the bus stop takes in deer, buzzards, rolling parkland and the Muddy Boots cafe. Half an hour away on the 36 bus, Leeds has the free five-storey Royal Armouries museum overlooking the dock.

Word-class art indoors and out in Norwich

Elisabeth Frink’s ostrich-like structures stalk through waterside woods. Antony Gormley’s cast iron figures stand poised on rooftops and walkways across the brutalist University of East Anglia (UEA) campus. Henry Moore’s bronze forms recline on the lawns, and angular steel beasts by Lynn Chadwick crouch under a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s tower. The free sculpture park at the Sainsbury Centre is packed with iconic names from 20th-century art and architecture and set in 140 hectares of parkland that are yours to explore, with centuries-old oaks, wild rabbits, and free family-friendly tours and trails.

Inside the Norman Foster-designed gallery (pay what you can), relaunched in 2023, the works are eclectic. You can wander from ancient Chinese tomb figures to a dynamic new installation via a work by Picasso. Kids might like the glass box you can stand in to “become a work of art” near John Davies’ hyper-realistic Bucket Man. The ambitious summer exhibitions look at the meaning of life and aspects of play. Show your bus ticket in the cafe for a 10% discount.

Bus 25 from the station or city centre runs frequently to UEA and stops close to the Sainsbury Centre. It passes the huge square keep of Norwich Castle, which reopened last year after a £27.5m renovation project. There are sound-and-light shows on the old stone walls of the Great Hall and a £2.50 twilight ticket if you visit an hour before closing time.

Wildlife watching in the Lakes

The mossy, fern-fringed waterfalls at Aira Force are 45 minutes on bus 508 from Penrith station. The route runs beside Ullswater with views across the lake to bracken-cloaked Hallin Fell. It’s one of the trips in a new book on Where to Watch Wildlife in Britain By Low-Carbon Transport, along with 100 other car-free trips to nature-rich sites across the UK.

Look out for dippers, dragonflies and red squirrels. The area offers varied and spectacular walks, such as a pushchair- and mobility scooter-friendly stroll through the woods at Pooley Bridge or a hike up Gowbarrow Fell.

A LONDON museum filled with vintage tube carriages, trains and buses is getting a multi-million makeover.

The London Transport Museum opened almost 50 years ago and will be getting an extensive facelift and will be getting additional exhibition space too.

Designs have been revealed for the Covent Garden attraction showing off its new and colourful entranceway.

It will also get an extra 500 square metres of space for galleries, and there will be environmental upgrades too.

The attraction that’s found inside a Victorian flower market will remain open throughout the works, so visitors won’t miss out.

Inside is a huge collection of historic vehicles, including buses, trains, and early tube carriages.

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There are also exhibits on the 200 year history of London’s public transport, like original maps and posters.

The London Transport Museum also organises trips for the public down to the abandoned stations of Aldwych and Down Street.

The attraction is next to Covent Garden market and last year welcomed 450,000 visitors.

The entire project is predicted to cost £26million and is set to be complete before 2030.

Elizabeth McKay, LTM’s director and CEO told the Museum Association: “The capital project is £26m, but the good news is we are more than halfway there.”

Funders for the £26m project include Transport for London (TfL) and Arts Council England.

London Transport Museum Friends charity, is donating £300,000 between now and 2030 to support the redevelopment.

TfL commissioner Andy Lord said: “For more than 200 years, London’s public transport has shaped the capital and improved people’s lives in so many ways, from the world’s first underground railway to the iconic red bus, Oyster card and the Elizabeth line.

“I’m thrilled to support the new plans that showcase our transport heritage and the future of transport in the heart of Covent Garden.”

Visitors need an Annual Pass and a timed entry ticket to visit London Transport Museum in Covent Garden – these start from £22.50.

There are few things a Los Angeles local is less likely to do than take a Hollywood sightseeing tour on a big, garish bus. Only rush-hour traffic and $20 tacos inspire the same level of dread.

Yet nearly everyone aboard the open-air bus for a Tuesday night production of “California Gothic: A Bus Tour” was an L.A. resident. The show, which is produced by the aggressively hip New Theater Hollywood, recently wrapped its third “season” after debuting in February and returning for an April encore. Set on a moving bus, the 1.5-hour-long experience is part esoteric Tinseltown history lesson, part immersive theater. The narrative conjures meaning from the Los Angeles cityscape by fusing a hodgepodge of textbook theories about the sprawling metropolis onto the gritty reality of daily life.

“We originally organized this thinking there would be more people coming who aren’t from here,” said Oliver Misraje, the show’s writer and primary tour guide, as the bus pulled away from the curb at Santa Monica and Wilcox. “But this just goes to show how much people love the city and are from here, contrary to popular belief.”

In lieu of celebrity-hungry tourists, “California Gothic” has been packing its bus twice a night with rowdy young scenesters and in-the-know locals eager to absorb its heady mix of California history, public intellectualism and performance artistry.

While the show wrapped its latest run in mid-June, it will reopen its automated doors during the last week of October for a special “ghost tour” edition co-written by Misraje and New York it girl Ruby McCollister.

The bus arrives for New Theater Hollywood’s “California Gothic: A Bus Tour.”

My tour was far less steeped in irony than I feared. As the bus wound its way through the streets of Hollywood, starting at the New Theater’s doorstep before eventually circling the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Misraje led the audience through his take on the death of the “California dream” and the rotting carcasses of empty buildings and broken promises left in its wake. Along the way, we encountered a haunted-eyed Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Brooks Ginnan), a masked Hollywood legend known as the Duchess of Argyle (Shauna Frente) and a singing, swaggering “Rat Czar” with a lot to say about real estate developers (Loren Kramar).

Yes, it’s whimsical, and yes, it references Mike Davis’ “City of Quartz” more than any of the TMZ-type excursions it gently parodies, but it’s still, at its heart, a bus tour.

In a nod to classic Hollywood tour advertisements, the show’s winkingly all-caps poster declares, “You Will See: The Hollywood Sign, Marilyn Monroe, the Schizo City State.” There is also a stash of BuzzBallz ready-to-drink cocktails for trivia winners, but Misraje and his cast do not deliver their performances with smirks or smarm. They commit full-throatedly to playing out Misraje’s vision of a Hollywood haunted by the dreamers it’s wronged and the secrets it’s plastered over.

“Ultimately, we are trying to pay homage to the bus tour format, which is intrinsically ‘carny,’” Misraje said, likening himself to a carnival barker espousing aesthetic philosophy aboard an ever-changing “Ship of Theseus.”

Before the performers infiltrate the ship, “I’m trying to intentionally set up audience expectations to think they’re going to get this run-of-the-mill Hollywood death tour,” he explained. “I consider myself a kind of impish person, but still fundamentally sincere.”

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1. Tour guide Oliver Misraje begins the show. 2. Rat Czar, portrayed by Loren Kramar, performs during the bus tour. 3. Guests board the bus.

Given the show’s monologue-heavy format and bevy of literary references, it’s no surprise that the concept began as an essay. Misraje, a 27-year-old writer and self-described “Hollywood hustler” raised primarily in the Inland Empire, was inspired after the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires to stage a piece he had written bridging his love of Gothic literature with his “welfare class” upbringing in a family of seven raised by a single mother, which he considered gothic in its own right.

“We were in the Inland Empire and it was the 2008 financial crisis,” he said. “There was all this imagery of things famously California-coded, like the suburban house, the pool, the strip mall, and when we were there, it was just, like, destroyed. There were abandoned housing subdivisions rotting in the sun.”

The perfect setting, he explained, for the kind of “literature that emerges after the failure of a historical project.”

After reaching out to New Theater co-owner Calla Henkel and conceiving the project, Misraje and his producers elected to turn the funhouse mirror onto Hollywood, framing the neighborhood with historical context and Freudian theory but ultimately letting it speak for itself.

The bus passes the TCL Chinese Theatre.

The highly mutable nature of street life and the participatory character of the show means its tone can shift drastically from tour to tour, even within the same night. Sometimes, the streets appear glittering; other times, seedy and dangerous. Once, there was a showdown with another tour bus — one presumably not carrying theatergoers. At a different show, a drunk pedestrian tried to board the bus during faux-Monroe’s speech. One particularly harrowing night, someone circled the bus on an electric scooter, shouting homophobic slurs at the all-queer cast.

“It’s almost like surfing,” Misraje said. “There’s so much chaos you’re confronting, and you have to find a way to ride it and let it be a part of the show.”

The show’s high production costs make bringing in a profit difficult, but Misraje said he and the New Theater Hollywood team plan to revive it periodically, with an evolving story and cast of characters.

On my tour, no performer better represented the blurred line between theater and street life than the Duchess of Argyle, a.k.a. the Mysterious Masked Lady of Hollywoodland, a.k.a. Shauna Frente, a busty Blanche DuBois figure in an eyeless flapper mask and gartered stockings. Just three days before, she had been evicted from a home on Argyle Avenue that once allegedly belonged to Cecil B. DeMille. This happened after a lengthy legal battle, during which the show helped raise money for temporary housing.

As the Duchess spilled neighborhood secrets, our bus repeatedly passed an Extra Space Storage facility painted with images of old Hollywood behemoths: Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx and the like. The intermingling smells of sizzling hot dogs, urine and marijuana wafted through the open windows.

Hollywood may be ghostly, the Duchess told us, but it was hers to haunt.

Duchess of Argyle (Shauna Frente) tells Hollywood stories during the tour.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Footage shows a World Cup shuttle bus set into flames amid chaotic celebrations following the New York Knicks historic NBA Finals victory.

The views are remarkable. From one window, gorse-gold hills roll west towards mountains patched with snow. On the other side, fields of new spring lambs slope down to a silver sea. Elsewhere, the bus crosses wide estuaries and cascading burns. There are thatched crofts, rocky bays and birch woods starred with anemones. One of the most remarkable things about this scenic 111-mile, 3½-hour trip on bus X99 is that it costs just £2.

Until March 2026, a single from Inverness to Scrabster on Scotland’s north coast was £28. Now, thanks to a new bus fare cap in Orkney, Highland and Moray, no journey in the area costs more than £2. The bus is timed to coincide with the Northlink Ferry to Stromness, Orkney’s second biggest town, and I’m heading there to explore by bus.

The ferry’s dining room serves Orkney smoked-cheddar macaroni cheese and Orkney fudge cheesecake. Afterwards, I stagger out on deck for blustery views of the Old Man of Hoy, its red sandstone glowing in the sunset. Scrabster to Stromness (£22-£26 each way for foot passengers) is the only ferry route that passes this 137-metre-tall sea stack off the coast of Orkney’s most mountainous island. A seal weaves through the waves below, among wide-winged gannets and sleek guillemots.

I’m staying in a little whitewashed cottage called the Shed up the Lane, 10 minutes’ walk from the ferry port and just off paved Victoria Street with its shops and galleries. I can stroll from a flat white in elegant Stromness Coffee to dark island cake at Julia’s Shed via the Pier Arts Centre, a stylish light-filled gallery full of works by Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and others.

From April to October, bus X1 runs every half an hour, with an hourly service to the neolithic village at Skara Brae. Baby rabbits hop over the fields and sand martins are nesting in the cliffs nearby. You can still see where people slept, ate and kept bone tools on slab-built shelves 5,000 years ago. In summer, a ticket includes Skaill House, a delightful crow-stepped mansion. It was built by a 17th-century bishop, whose great-great-great-great-grandson, William Watt, first rediscovered Skara Brae in 1850 when a violent storm exposed the long-buried stone-age houses.

I get the bus to the Ring of Brodgar (free) and, with no parked car to get back to, hop back on after a two-mile linear walk to the Stones of Stenness (also free). Sandwiched between one salty loch and one freshwater, the area includes an RSPB reserve. I follow a flowering loch-side trail, where redshanks and oystercatchers forage on the shore. Swans are nesting near the Bridge of Brodgar and one pair have built their causeway-nest from seaweed.

Bus X1 heads towards St Margaret’s Hope and I get on, meaning to go all the way. The hour-long journey crosses the Churchill Barriers linking four islands, passing the Italian chapel on Lamb’s Holm, and ends near the Murray Arms, known for its seafood. But it’s beautiful weather outside and already past lunchtime. Another passenger recommends the Loki Seafood Shack, hidden on an industrial estate near Stromness. A few minutes later, I’m sitting in the sunshine eating fresh, hand-dived scallops with chilli jam and griddled hake with red Thai butter. The shack is run by chefs Leigh Gould and Alan Skinner. Leigh explains how the scallops are sustainably harvested by scuba divers, “just like picking potatoes out of a field, except the potatoes are under water”.

Back in Stromness, I walk round the coast with views across sparkling Scapa Flow to Hoy’s volcanic mountains. On the way, Stromness Museum (£7.50/free for kids) is an old-school treasure trove. Exhibits cover 5,000 years, from a rare neolithic figurine to Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown’s rocking chair. There are harpoons and snowshoes, painted chests and carved whalebones. In a glass case of Victorian stuffed birds, I’m finally able to ID the colourful birds I’ve seen hopping around the beaches all day as wheatears.

Puffins, known locally as “tammie norries”, are returning to their nesting places for the summer. The best place on Orkney mainland to see them is around the cliffs in the island’s northwestern corner. Wild Orkney Walks is offering new bus-friendly tours for 2026, including the May-August Seabird City Experience (£40). It’s designed to fit the timetable for bus 8S, which runs close to the RSPB reserve at Marwick Head.

It’s still only April when I visit, so I plan to take bus 8S next morning and walk to Birsay, through the ruins of a 16th-century palace. The only sounds are cows, curlews and crashing waves. Near the village church, there’s an honesty box selling biscuits called fattie cutties and jars of rhubarb chutney. I cross the snaking low-tide causeway to the Brough of Birsay, admire a Viking church and look at the seabirds on the cliffs below the lighthouse. Then I follow the coast, where the turf is springy with budding thrift, clifftops gold with celandines, and fulmars chuckle from rocky nest-ledges. Waiting, near bird-rich Birsay beach, for bus 7 back to Stromness, three puffins fly past in the misty light. At the wood-panelled Ferry Inn, supper is a perfectly cooked slab of chargrilled salmon with green beans, pea shoots, fresh apple and pickled radishes.

With a few hours next day until my ferry, I get the bus to Kirkwall to visit St Magnus Cathedral. On the way, there’s one more prehistoric site: you can only visit Maeshowe chambered cairn on a guided tour via shuttle bus from the visitor centre in Stenness. The grassy banks are sprinkled with violets; inside, there is runic, dagger-carved Viking graffiti. Runes suggest ancient wisdom, but this is loo-door stuff: “Haermund Hardaxe woz ’ere.”

Bus travel means I can end with a drink. Orkney has two huge and centuries-old distilleries: Highland Park and Scapa. The harbourside Orkney Distillery, founded in 2016, is much smaller and has so far produced mostly gin. Their first single malt whisky will be ready in 2027. An engaging tour ends with tasters, after which it’s a four-minute stumble to the bus station. I spend the night, across the water, at Scrabster’s Ferry Inn. My £2 bus next morning is run by Ember (book ahead), the world’s first all-electric, intercity bus company with wifi and charging points.

Back in Inverness, the brand new Inverness Castle Experience (£20), presenting itself as a gateway to the Highlands, involves immersive sound-and-light shows scrolling across the Victorian castle walls. There are soaring eagles, thundering oceans and whispering stag-filled forests, while spectral voices say things like: “It’s a voyage, it’s a pilgrimage, it’s a saga.” Next door, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (free) has an amazing collection of Highland stuff: Caithness glass, a carved Pictish wolf, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s death mask … There’s time to stroll round Ness Islands, and enjoy live music in the Victorian Market’s food hall, before boarding the Caledonian Sleeper (seats from £54, twin cabins from £290). The night train will replace leafy riverside Inverness with grey London towers. But before I sleep, there’s sea bass and a glass of cold white wine as the sun sets over the Cairngorms.

The trip was supported by Visit Scotland with transport provided by Northlink Ferries and Caledonian Sleeper

Round-trip train tickets brought down to $98 from $150, and bus fares to cost $20 instead of $80, state officials say.

Local governments in New Jersey and New York have reduced the cost of train and bus tickets for commuters travelling to the states’ joint World Cup venue during the tournament.

New Jersey Transit train tickets to the MetLife Stadium, renamed New Jersey New York Stadium for the FIFA World Cup, will now cost $98 as opposed to the earlier price set at $150 for a return fare, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced on Wednesday.

“Ahead of NJ Transit World Cup train tickets going on sale tonight, NJTRANSIT is lowering ticket prices to $98 without New Jersey taxpayer money,” Sherrill wrote in a social media post.

The move followed intense backlash from local and international football fans planning to attend World Cup games at the stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, where the tournament’s final will be held on July 19.

The $98 fare, which will be charged during the World Cup matches hosted in New Jersey, is still significantly higher than the regular fare of $13 for the 29km (18-mile) round trip from New York City’s Penn Station.

When the $150 fare was announced, Sherrill defended it by suggesting the upcharge was necessary to ensure that her state’s commuters were not stuck with a “tab for years to come” for hosting the World Cup on its return to the United States for the first time since 1994.

NJ Transit officials said it would cost $62m to transport fans to and from the stadium over the duration of the tournament and outside grants had defrayed only $14m of those anticipated expenses.

“This isn’t price gouging,” NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri said last month. “We’re literally trying to recoup our costs.”

Meanwhile, the cost of taking a shuttle bus from New York City to the World Cup venue has also been reduced.

“The cost of shuttle bus tickets to and from matches will be reduced from the initial $80 round-trip price to $20,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on the same Wednesday.

The move from the NYNJ Host Committee offers some respite for fans who would have already spent thousands of dollars on attending a World Cup game, largely due to the exorbitant match ticket prices, international and local airfares, and visa costs.

The host city officials said 20 percent of bus tickets for each match will be reserved exclusively for New York state residents. The remaining tickets will be available for all match-going fans.

The US is cohosting the tournament with Mexico and Canada. It begins on June 11.