Friday, 17 October, 2014. We flew on Turkish Air. We paid an extra $10 per ticket to fly with them because they brag about being selected “Best Airline in Europe” the last few years. We landed at London Gatwick 30 minutes late. Otherwise, it was a good flight, but our vote for Best Airline in Europe still goes to TAP Portugal Airlines. I mean, TAP serves free wine, c’mon.
Our travel plan has us staying put in England until the day we board the Queen Mary 2 for our crossing (note it’s a “crossing”, not a “cruise”). Returning to London from Istanbul, we would proceed straight to Gloucester, convenient to our real destination, The Cotswolds. We’d stay for just a long 3-day weekend, then we’d be off to a little village a few minutes north of Nottingham where we’ll stay for a little over three weeks. Then it’s a week in London for a show and Christmas shopping, followed up by three weeks in the English Lake Country (where we hope to see our first snow of the season) before we head to Southampton where the 7th largest cruise ship in the world will be waiting to take us home.
We proceeded through immigration and moseyed around Gatwick for a bit too long. Despite our (self-proclaimed) status of expert travelers, we should have paid a little more attention to the train schedules. It was early afternoon and we found an airport pub to park ourselves in. Lori’s burger and my nachos had just arrived when I realized we needed to get to London’s Paddington station to catch the 3:30 train to Gloucester, else the fares the rest of the afternoon would double. I checked my watch: it was a few minutes before 2:00. An hour and a half plus a few minutes wasn’t a wealth of time, but it seemed it should be enough, nonetheless we picked up our pace eating lunch.
We had to wait in a surprisingly long line to buy our express train tickets from Gatwick into London’s Victoria Station. We only had to wait a few minutes for the next train, but the 30 minute express stretched on to 45 minutes. It was a quarter to three when we arrived at Victoria Station. We only needed to get on the tube and get to Paddington in 45 minutes. Still close, but doable.
Except that Victoria Station was swamped. Packed. Swarming. Sea of humanity, and all that. We forgot that it was Friday afternoon, and it looked as though ALL of London were trying to get out of the city via Victoria Station. And then we had to stand in line to buy tube tickets. The possibility that we wouldn’t make it was greater, and I was wondering if we hung around Paddington until early evening whether the fares dropped back down. That would put us into Gloucester very late.
Tickets in hand, we hurried to the tube and jumped on a shoulder-to-shoulder packed train. It was 3:00 and I told Lori I didn’t think we were going to make it. I suggested we could hang around Paddington until late, when the fares might drop. Lori shrugged, so I knew she didn’t like that option any better than I. We might just have to suck it up and pay the premium rush-hour fares. Counting our stops, we realized we had miscounted the number of tube stops between Victoria and Paddington.
I had pretty much given up by the time we stepped off the tube. With only ten minutes left before our scheduled train departure and Paddington as equally swamped as Victoria, our only hope seemed to be that our train might actually be running a few minutes late. We still had to buy tickets, after all, and finding and waiting in the ticket line had already proven as delaying as getting from train to tube and vice versa. Paddington being compact compared to Victoria, we found the board easily. In one of those rare moments, we were actually disappointed that our train was still reported as on time.
I checked my watch: we had 8 minutes. I surveyed the platforms, and there being only 10, I made the very snap decision that we could make it if we could quickly buy our tickets. We asked a suited Londoner on his way out of the city where the ticket machines were, and he directed us to the far left wall. We hightailed over there. There were two machines: one occupied by an older lady in no particular hurry, the older by a 20-something who seemed to be playing video poker rather than buying a ticket. The older lady finished first. A minute later our tickets were purchased and we were wishing the machine’s printer worked faster.
Tickets in hand, your intrepid empty nest travel blog couple had 3 minutes, maybe less (you know you’re cutting it close when you start thinking in seconds). We jogged back to the board, and–Murphy’s Law–our platform was the furthest one. Our jogging pace increased. We stepped onto our train just as the conductor put the whistle to his mouth and waved the white paddle. Two hours later–right on time–we were in Gloucester for our long weekend.
It’s good to be back in the UK.
