Chauffeur Services in Poole

Two things decide the length of most Poole journeys: the Sandbanks road, and the chain ferry at Shell Bay. Come a warm Saturday, the queue for that ferry can reach back along the peninsula and hold there a good while, and the crossing itself pauses for weather and for its annual maintenance. Round by Wareham and Corfe is further, yet it often proves faster and always proves steadier. We pick between the two on the day, never in advance.

The port keeps a timetable of its own. Check-in for the Channel Islands and cross-Channel sailings shuts a long while before departure, and the approach down the A350 and West Quay Road thickens ahead of that, worst at the start of school holidays. In town, Twin Sails and the lifting bridges open to schedule and stop traffic briefly on either side. For an early Southampton flight we would leave Poole around two and a half hours ahead.

On a long journey, Britain's weather does more damage than its traffic ever will. Winter afternoons close in early, and that matters a great deal when the final leg is a single-track road. Highland and moorland routes can run substantially longer than any summer estimate suggests. Those allowances go into the timings from the start, rather than being discovered together halfway up a glen. Where a departure hour makes the schedule uncomfortable, we propose a better one.

Demand tracks the calendar closely. Bank holiday weekends fill fast, so do the weeks either side of Christmas, the summer wedding season and those university terms that all begin and end together. The further from London a journey runs, the sooner a car wants committing to it. Midweek travel in the shoulder months, by contrast, is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.