The Scotland trip - Day 1 - Hove to Edinburgh

8:28

I am a little bit too early, but cannot quite help myself. I tell my housemate that I will be leaving in the next few minutes for Scotland. The overall excitement is so great that I promise to write them a card. I am notoriously bad at sending postcards. Buying them is easy enough but I never get around to actually sending them.

I go back to my room, pack the last things into my brand new backpack, tie up the trash, put on my jacket and I am ready to go. There is a bit of a hole in my stomach. The Starbucks frappe mocca has been digested. Time to get some proper breakfast – on the way to the station at Tescos. Food on the go: Tropicana Orange Juice, with the bits and a Jumbo Almond Croissant. And some chewing gum for the heck of it.

8:35

I still need to get the ticket from Hove to Brighton, but Hove station is not very busy. Turns out that I can take a train earlier than expected. And if I have learnt something in my life then it’s the fact that if you are early and have the opportunity to take a means of public transport that is earlier than the one you wanted to take originally, it is wise to do so. Because life is a bitch and loves to slap you in the face. If you attempt to take the one you wanted to take in the first place, you can bet your sorry ass that you will be late.

8:44

The train to Brighton pulls into the station. I hear the following announcement: “The final stop is Brighton. Passengers are advised that this train is not scheduled to have toilets.” Oh dear! What if it does have loos after all? Would that be a bad sign? The devil on my left shoulder tells me to check if it does and then to complain, if there are. The angel on my right shoulder patiently tells me to resist the temptation.

8:47 Brighton

Yay! First leg of the journey was smooth. Then again… it was a 3 minute journey. Granted, I am sure that there are some train companies that would manage to screw this up. The Deutsche Bahn for instance. I really believe that they should have a screwdriver as their logo. I leave it to you to figure out why... 
Anyway, now I have quite some time to kill. My train to London is not due until 9:19. And I will have to wait for this one, as I booked this train specifically to save more than a tenner. I decide to eat my Croissant, sip my OJ and wait for the train to come.

9:10
The platform for the train has just been announced. I am confused. The train looks very much like the Gatwick Express. I double-check my ticket. It’s that train alright. An announcement is made that the train looks like the Gatwick Express, but is, in fact, an ordinary train from Brighton to London Victoria.
Ok, whatever.
I board the train and conquer a seat. This part of the journey, I have done a couple of times. The sun is shining and driving across East Sussex is beautiful, but this time around, the Metro distracts me and I read for a bit, knowing that I have hours of (unknown) scenery ahead.

10:20 London Victoria

It’s not like I am pressed for time, but I have been there and done that about a dozen times. It’s truly not exciting anymore. I head straight for the Underground, glare impatiently at bloody foreigners who don’t know where they are going. Bleugh.

10:45 London King’s Cross

King's X at its most pleasant

Got plenty of time to spare and have started looking at everything around me through the eyes of a tourist. – I think that may be my backpack’s fault. The weather is simply beautiful. Bright sunshine, blue skies. I leave King’s Cross for a short stroll. The first thing I see is a sign saying “Platform 9 ¾”. A trolley seems to disappear half way into the wall. It comes as no surprise that this is a tourist attraction. I smile and head towards St Pancreas. The sky is blue. The red and white building is strikingly beautiful. I spend some time taking pictures. Then I slowly head back to King’s Cross to see if the platform for my train has already been announced. It has not. I wait for another 15 minutes until the platform is announced. The train looks really cool.

Grand Central train

I need to walk a bit to board the first class carriage, but when I look at the seats my heart does a summersault. They are very wide and are somewhat reclined. I sit down and savour the atmosphere. 

Grand Central - lovely!

The next 2 hours are going to be smooth and comfortable for sure. The trolley comes through, offering me a free beverage, complimentary cookies and a free newspaper.

I turn on my iPod, pick the playlist with relaxing music and direct my attention towards the paper since I am pretty familiar with the landscape between London King’s Cross and St Neots. Nevertheless, I cannot quite help myself to look up every now and then.

There is a small surge of memories as we pass Welwyn Garden City and a somewhat bigger surge as we fly past St Neots. 
The landscape is rife with summer. The would outside is made of sunshine, blue skies with some white clouds, golden carpets of wheat, some darker than others because the clouds cast some shadows on the fields. Lush green bushes and trees add even more colour. It is a feast for the eyes, my mind drifts into pleasant relaxation as I sip on coffee, nibble on a cookie and listen to the House MD OST.

Booking first class with Grand Central was a very good idea, even if it means that I have a stopover in York to change trains, because – alas – Grand Central does not go to Edinburgh.

This part of the journey reminds me a of a story by M. R. James which starts as follows "How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station." (A view from a hill, M. R. James)
Ok, I am not completely alone in the first class carriage and the holiday is not really long either, but everything else is so perfect that these two details do not really matter all that much. There is plenty of adventures ahead, I am sure.

Along the way, there are some markers, made of steel, art noveau style, painted in white, announcing “Edinburgh 250 miles”, “Edinburgh 200 miles”.

13:27 York

The train has arrived on time. I feel a tad bit peckish and decide to step out of the station, because I have an hour to fill. To be on the safe side and to account for delays, I did not book the East Coast train to Edinburgh, which would have left the station 40 minutes earlier than my Cross Country train. Without giving it much thought, I just go for a small walk… on the York town wall. And then I head back to the station to eat a kid’s meal at Burger King. I needed something warm, but not too filling.

14:33
The Cross Country train towards Edinburgh is a minute late. Seriously, since we’re neither in Japan, Switzerland nor Norway, no one cares. A minute is nothing. No need to hang your head in shame. Anything over 5 minutes though… death sentence. (That would be a way to deal with overpopulation: forcing stupid people become train conductors and then OFF with their head if it is late.)

Anyway, to save money, I had booked the quiet coach, which was expensive enough at £39.50, rather than first class at even more quid pro space.

When booking a ticket for the quiet coach online, it says “Are you sure you want to book the quiet coach? Mobile phone, loud music and conversations are a big no-no, so you’d better book the normal coach, if you want to be allowed to breathe.”

Well, I deliberately chose the quiet coach. And guess what. My fellow passengers probably did not. 

So, now I am squeezing into my reserved seat in the quiet coach. It really feels claustrophobic after the splendid first class that Grand Central offers.
I plug my headphones into my ears and turn on the iPod. 
Three rows further back, an lady starts talking to her friend. I turn up the volume to max, but Jim Dale does not stand a chance. Three people around me have finished their – rather nicely smelling – Cornish Pasties and squeeze the paper wraps into little balls. I can hear this perfectly well. Two rows ahead of me are two kids who annoy their parents with stupid questions. Well, I am not sure if the parents are annoyed, but I am, that’s for sure. The lady behind me continues to ramble on incessantly.
What on earth is going on? I have noise-cancelling ear-plugs and yet my audio book is drowned out by the racket that people around me make.

I wonder if “quiet” has a different meaning to them. I am just a bloody foreigner after all. Maybe the Oxford English Dictionary offers two entries for “quiet”. One for English speaking citizens “quiet - annoy everyone and their mama with your piercing voice and boring stories that no one gives a flying f**k to hear but everyone is too polite to actually say so”.

The entry for foreigners is “quiet - making as little noise as possible”.

Twenty minutes into the ride from hell, I give up.

I pick up my bag, head for the next carriage to find a less loud space. On my way there, still in the quiet coach, I also see that there is a party of six people who have put a cake with a candle on one of the tables to celebrate a birthday. They are loud, but their noise had been cancelled by Lady Blah-Blah and the two kids who would greatly benefit from realising that silence is golden.
As I am walking through the other carriages, all rather filled to capacity, I realise that each of them is nowhere near as loud as the supposedly “quiet” coach.

After fighting my way through the whole train, I have tracked down the conductor. I tell him that I booked the quiet coach because I wanted to have a quiet journey, but it turned out to be the loudest of the lot. He does not seem too bothered. Then again, he is hiding on the opposite part of the train.
I ask him how much an upgrade into first class – which was heavenly quiet, despite having a family with two very young children – would cost me.

He tells me that this would amount to £85. I shake my head and then he reconsiders, offering me a ticket for £49.50 since I do not need a ticket from York to Edinburgh but from Newcastle to Edinburgh. Being faced with paying almost 50 quid and spend the next 90 minutes in quiet and spacious first class or returning to riff-raff country, I choose to pay up and be done with it.

Goodness me! It is so worth it! The train attendant passes at regular intervals and asks if I would like something to eat or to drink. I can stretch my legs… not as far as with Grand Central, but considerably more than in wood & decibel class. Even when I have to give up my seat to a lady who had reserved it and go and sit with a rather, uhm large, Highlander in his kilt, who smelt faintly of sour cabbage, my mood is still miles higher than it would have been in the not quite quiet coach.
The rest of the journey is pure bliss all the way from Newcastle to Edinburgh, past Alnmouth and Berwick-upon-Tweed where the train follows the coastline and gives me picturesque glimpses of the sea hitting rocks or rolling onto sandy beaches.

18:05

I have found the hotel but almost died of a heart attack on my way there. 

In preparation of the trip, I had printed out the fastest way to get from Waverley Station to the hotel. And it all looked very easy on Googlemaps. Since I had never been to Edinburgh, I had not really considered that some parts can get rather steep... and that "The News Steps" are indeed steps and it is not just a few of them. Since I am also carrying a backpack of about 20 Kilos, it took me a good 5 minutes to recover from the climb.

18:30

Checked into the hotel, inspected my room, which is pretty large. After freshening up, I head back out because I need cash and something to eat. And I would like to watch HP7 Part2. The idea of watching the last film where it all began is intriguing. So I am heading towards the cinema. On the way, I see a bank and fill up my wallet. Since it is closed already, I cannot rob it, so I use the cash machine to get the cash legally. 
I check the film times and see that I can fit a meal before the show starts. Right around the corner, I see Illegal Jacks which fits the bill quite nicely because I need still need to do something illegal today.

19:20

The chilli-con carne has started to make its way through my digestive system. I am off to the cinema.

22:30

Back in my hotel room and quite knackered. I turn on the TV and see that there are breaking news about a bombing and a shooting in Norway. What the heck is wrong with people these days?