Planes, Trains and Sheesh

A few hours before our flight, when I was still comfortably sitting at my parent’s house, I got a text notification that the flight was delayed.  It was only an hour, and I had given myself a generous (so I thought) nearly five hour window between our flight landing at Heathrow and the departure of our National Rail Service train from Kings Cross station. So it would be a little tighter than anticipated, no big deal.  Except that hour kept growing, first to an hour and a half, then to 2 hours, 3 hours, until our 6:15 PM scheduled flight finally pulled away from the gate around 10:00 PM.

As is usually the case with such nonsense it was not entirely any one person’s fault, nor was it in control of anyone person, and it certainly was beyond our control.  We helplessly careened towards a point where we knew that our 109 Pound advance train tickets were going to become just two pieces of paper.  It is a rather unpleasant feeling to be on the wrong side of an ocean, with nothing to do but sit, in a boarding area, and on a plane, while your plans go awry, but such is modern travel.

We did indeed miss our train, and that's when the fun really began.  The replacement tickets were over twice as much, and we were not guaranteed seats, but we did get on a train where there were a few empty seats, at least at Kings X.  We had just over two hours of rather pleasant cruising through the farmlands of southern England.  We got some sleep and tried to ignore the rather foreboding reserved tags that fluttered on the backs of our chairs.

Sure enough, in York the rightful heirs of our places boarded Sir Richard Branson's train and we became dispossessed of our comfy seats.  We were now people without a country, and we were not alone, there were others who had boarded the train in London with similar situations, and so we all sought now nonexistent seats.  A particularly galling aspect of this search were the people who quite shamefully had spread out over two seats and refused to make eye contact with the refugees.  In microcosm (with admittedly much lower stakes) I understood viscerally why people fleeing war zones tend to develop a rather sour attitude towards wealthy, secure nations who refuse them sanctuary.

We found a rather out of the way place to stand in the food car.  There was a little nook at the end of the counter, where I could wedge my backpack and Michele could lean against the wall.  It meant having to repeatedly assure people coming in to buy the heinously overpriced crisps and sodas that we were in fact, "not in the queue."  I was at least a little charmed by the politeness of those folks, and of the staff, in whose way we were just a bit.  The staff apparently apprehended our difficultly and did not give us dirty looks or harass us, but neither did they do anything to ameliorate our condition, like find us seats.

There were seats in first class, unoccupied seats, there were those rude seat hoarders in coach, but probably not enough for all the refugees.  We weren't even allowed to walk into first class, that would disturb the people who apparently paid a month's rent for their seats.  I tried to resist the urge to indulge in revolutionary fantasies as we stood in the speeding train for two and a half hours from York to Edinburgh.

We arrived in Scotland only about an hour and half later than our original ETA, but the whole thing seemed rather more of an ordeal than it would have been otherwise.  However, I feel that I gained a rather more sympathetic attitude towards the displaced and dispossessed.  One of these days I will figure out how to arrive in a foreign land without some sort of travel mishap, but not this day.

Since our arrival in Edinburgh things have been absolutely wonderful, but I will get to that later.