It's quite tiring in fact to know that every time I head to a home game, I have roughly an hour drive ahead of me to get there. Night games were even worse, finishing work at 6pm before our Friday night game against Rochdale, traffic along the way meant I only made it to the stadium about 10 minutes before kick off. It's not ideal as most people who know me know that I like to be at the ground well in advance. It may have been a home game and my season ticket would have come into play to get my normal seat, but that's not the principle of the thing.

With the current stupid rules regarding parking at Sincil Bank, the common and various other things, it's means that I'm having to wake up early to stand a chance of getting there in a decent amount of time so that I can get parked for free. Driving up the same tired roads isn't exactly something I look forward to, driving up and down the A46 at least twenty-three times a season isn't as appealing as it sounds, especially as you get nutters who are prepared to risk their lives to get one car length's distance closer to wear they want to be.

I didn't imagine that when I moved last summer that I'd be so frustrated about the distance I have to go to get to home games. It wouldn't be so bad if there were alternatives roads to the A46 that would get me there on time, the only "quick" (and I do use the word loosely) alternative route is driving via Mansfield and through the back roads before ending up just outside of Saxilby....a journey that takes about ninety minutes.

However, it's not all bad as with the vast majority of games for the Imps involve travelling down the A46 at some point, meaning I get to skip about an hour or two out of the journey, allowing more time for rest. It made that four hour drive all the more "tolerable" knowing that even though I was completely on my own, that at least I had more sleep than the majority of the other City fans who made the trip.

There were trips that would normally take two/three hours to get to places such as Macclesfield, Shrewsbury and various others, but now they're only an hour to ninety minutes away. Then again, the flip side of the coin saw me take two hours to get to Grimsby, a trip that would only take an hour from Lincoln. Then there is the awfully monotonous motorways, driving to places like Bury, Rochdale, Accrington, etc, on just two motorways (the M1 and M62), a journey that makes 1 hour 45 seem like days.

However, enough of moaning about the roads and onto other issues regarding exiles.  As I mentioned earlier, living in an alternative area means that I get virtually no coverage on the Imps. There's no five-page coverage from the Lincolnshire Echo, no post-match analysis where they describe virtually every player as poor, but rate them with the same numbers as when they reckon the player(s) have played well. There's no two or so minute pieces every once in a while on Look North Hull, and no radio coverage on Lincoln at all. All I get to rely on is the local teams saying they deserve to do better, news about violence and various other things associated with Nottingham.

Infact, it does get harder writing articles when you don't live in the city where your team is based. Obviously if I supported a Premiership club then I'd have no end of news pieces about us on Sky Sports News, but I support a League Two club and that means maybe two or three seconds worth of out-of-date information on the information reel at the bottom, although they often take commercial breaks when the news reel bit comes on.

Then we get onto the issue with ticket issues, buying stuff from the club shop and other various aspects to again deal with travel to Sincil Bank. Buying a ticket for an away game is no longer a case of taking a very quick trip on my lunch hour to Sincil Bank and getting it there and then returning to work. The mailing at Sincil Bank hasn't improved either as I've ordered several items over the internet, not arriving until up to two weeks later.

However, living away from Lincoln isn't necessarily a bad thing. It has allowed me to meet new people, make new friends (and enemies) and learn more about other areas of the country. If City aren't playing then I have the opportunity to go to one of the four football clubs within a few miles of Nottingham (Forest, County, Eastwood and Ilkeston), although some of the football I witnessed from those four clubs was certainly not very good. Infact, even Sam Mullarkey could have scored against these teams as they played that badly.

In Lincoln I was one of many City fans and that didn't allow much variation on conversations about football, but now I have lived and worked with fans of Nottingham Forest, Notts County, Derby County, Chesterfield, Luton Town, Sheffield United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Carlisle United, such is the variation on living in a big city. In Lincoln I only had a few Grimsby fans, the odd Scunthorpe fan here and there, but that was it.

So is being an exile a good thing? In some ways it is, in others it is not. There is obviously the disadvantage of living away from the location of the football team you support and that you aren't as regularly updated as fans who live near the ground, but there are also many advantages. You extend your knowledge about other football teams through other fans and share in their experiences.

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