Please forgive me, but this made me laugh out loud. It sucks, I know. I get you, but it's still funny.
Hey, I live in town so it's a 10 minute drive up to class for me. Not a problem on my end, but I know several people in the class that commute from out of town that were pretty angry when they heard that the prof was out of town all week. Lots of grumbling about waste of gas on the way out of class.
One of the guys I knew at uni lived on the Isle of Wight. Had to get up about 3 hours early to catch the hovercraft across to the mainland, before he could get to the University. He didn't actually get digs closer until around the last year ...