We woke up at 6:20am on Wednesday, July 20 on the same platform in the same city. Xavier had set an alarm when we got in bed, before we realized the train wasn’t leaving. I woke around 3am (all the various scenarios running through my head) and read on Twitter that we were supposed to be off the train by 5:30am but that time had obviously come and gone. We decided we’d wait until they threw us off the train considering we didn’t know yet what we were doing or how we were getting to London. I think Xavier assumed that the sleeper train might just leave in the morning and we could stay on. Unfortunately, it had to be much more complicated.
We weren’t sure we were going to find a train to London. The staff we spoke with said that they weren’t sure any trains were going to be running that day. We waited in line at LNER to pleasantly discover that the first train scheduled to run to London was at 8:30am and supposedly every half hour after that. We decided not to try for the 8:30am considering it would likely be packed. Instead, we checked our bags at the station and walked to the Royal Mile to find breakfast.
After we returned to the station, we didn’t realize it would take quite so long to find a train that could accommodate us. After much waiting and after seeing several packed trains arrive and depart, we finally got on a train around 1pm that was SUPPOSED to go to London King’s X. They were only promising it would go as far as Peterborough but, if you were lucky and the issues on the tracks were solved, it MIGHT take you to London. Not an ideal way to travel. It’s usually best to board a train when you’re sure of it’s destination but we decided getting closer to London would put us in a better position than we currently found ourselves.
We boarded the train, ready for our 5-hour journey. We played poker, we stared out the window at the English countryside. Some of us played Nintendo and some of us complained about the horrible Wi-Fi service. Some of us cried because we were so exhausted and some of us crashed.
We made it to London around 6pm, ran to get a train to Whitstable for another 75-minute train journey, arrived to Whitstable around 7:30pm, found no taxis and had to walk with all our luggage to the cottage. Then we collapsed. We had arrived at our destination approximately 24 hours — one full day — after we began our journey at Edinburgh Waverley. We should have been in Australia for the amount of time it took to travel — not in the same country as we started.
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