What’s the Deal With the Heathrow Express Train?

Twickenham Stadium, the home of rugby union in England. Also the home of the NFL in London, as well as occasional concerts, including U2, Lady Gaga, and Rihanna.

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We’re in London now. Kensington is our home away from home for the next three weeks.

I’ve never used the express train from Heathrow before, but I did this time. What’s the consensus on this? Is it worth it? That depends a bit on where you’re going, I suppose, but here’s how it seemed to play out to me. The starting point is the entrance to the tube station in Terminal 2/3:

Basically, we paid about $60 to avoid the 20-minute schlep with luggage. Which might be worth it, I suppose, but it seems kinda pricey. I think we would have been better off taking a taxi from the airport or else using the tube and then taking our chances on finding a taxi at Earl’s Court. Live and learn.

BY THE WAY: I forgot to mention this, but if you want to follow our vacation more regularly—and really, why wouldn’t you?—you can check out my Facebook page. I’m not much of a Facebooker, but for vacation photos and commentary it seems like the best tool for the job.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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