Tripping

My trip with my daughter over the last two days eventually achieved our aim, but could hardly have said to have gone according to plan. We set off as intended, by road to our local mainline station, to get a train down to Par in time to start the expedition proper, at just before 7:30 yesterday morning. Everything was going swimmingly until we got to Newton Abbot, an hour and a half later, but that was the end of the original itinerary. We then proceeded (no pun intended) to sit at for Newton Abbot for over two hours, while Great Western tried to resuscitate one of their HST sets which had expired at Dawlish. With the further knock-on effects en route, it was virtually lunchtime by the time the train approached Taunton, almost four and a half hours to cover just over 100 miles. We were both pretty fed up by that point, and decided to get off the train that we'd been intending to stick with through to Birmingham, not least because we were both pretty hungry by that point, having not had much in the way of breakfast. There was serious talk of aborting the trip and going home, but, after an early lunch in a local pub, lubricated by a couple of beers on my part, we decided to carry on, albeit with a radically different travel plan. My daughter had never been to Wales, apart from a couple of brief visits when she was a toddler, which she obviously didn't remember, so she decided she wanted to go to Cardiff (which had been pencilled in for day 2 of our trip if time permitted) for the afternoon. I didn't see any reason not to accommodate her, so we set off again from Taunton, via Bristol. Next spanner in the works - the weather took a substantial turn for the worse. We arrived in Cardiff to be greeted by torrential rain. Neither of us had any ambition to get drenched walking aimlessly around a city we weren't familiar with, so our trip to the principality effectively became a 'non-lander', as we jumped on the first long distance train that appeared, which happened to be going to Manchester. That was a happy accident in a couple of senses, in that it was a place I was much more at home with - I've lived in and around Manchester, in three phases of my life, for nearly fifteen years - and that it landed us in the part of the country that we'd been intending to be in at the end of 'Day one' of our trip. It also led to the first element of our revised plan for the trip which was advantageous. By the time we got to Manchester, at around 7:30 last night, food was on the agenda again, and my daughter expressed a preference for Chinese. Manchester's 'Chinatown' is only a ten minute or so walk from Piccadilly station, so that's where we headed. In all honesty, it was a bit of a hit and miss affair on my part, because, in all the years I'd lived in the area, I'd only ever been for one meal in Chinatown, and that was an upmarket affair intended to impress a lady friend (before I met my wife, I hasten to add), but we struck lucky on this occasion, finding ourselves in a restaurant offering an 'all you can eat' buffet menu for £8 a head. It really was very good, perhaps illustrated by the fact that there seemed to be quite a number of the local Chinese community eating there. I've always reckoned that if you go where the locals go to eat, you can't go too far wrong, and that seemed to be the watchword in this case. We didn't pig out too gratuitously, always a temptation in the 'all you can eat' format - although there were a few student-ish types there, who probably were! - but enjoyed some genuinely pleasant food. Crap beer, though - to be fair, they're a restaurant, not a pub, so that's a bit of a cavilling comment on my part. By the time we'd finished eating, any last hope we might have had of short-circuiting our trip and heading for home - which would've meant catching the last Manchester-London train of the day and then coming home on the overnight service to Cornwall - had gone, so we were faced with the problem of how to deal with the overnight phase of the trip. After some perusal of the options, we ended up by undertaking two round trips over the Pennines, before going on to Preston at around 4:15 this morning, and then catching the first train of the day to Cark. If that sounds like plain sailing, I'm afraid it wasn't. The next issue that didn't conform to the ideal, although I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else, really, was that, between 10:15 last night and 6:15 this morning, we had to deal with three separate groups of offensive drunks. The first problem arose at York last night - York races had seemingly been on during the day, and, contrary to my stereotypes of racegoers, 95% of them, female as well as male, appeared to be drunk to the point of incapacity. I can certainly not claim to be innocent of being drunk in public (although it's been a good many years since my last lapse - February 15 2001 springs to mind as a black mark in my copybook, and there are two reasons why I can remember the specific date), but I think I can honestly say that I've never been rowdy or irritating to others in my cups, and I find it thoroughly inconsiderate that others don't share my restraint. The next one and a half 'Roses' trips went smoothly, before the second episode of 'pondlife on tour' , with a bunch of nightclubbers assuming the right to ignore other people by way of shouting, swearing and implicitly making clear that anyone who had the temerity to complain would be on their 'hitlist', and generally implying that anyone who impinged on 'their territory' was most unwelcome. The final indignity was, ironically, on the train that actually took us to Cark, with yet another gang of selfish, drunken yobs on their way back from an 18th birthday party making life barely tolerable for everyone else. I'm sorry if I sound like some boring fart moaning about the 'youth of today', but I find such arrantly selfish behaviour quite unacceptable, and, in any case, the first crowd (of racegoers) were largely middle-aged, rendering their antics indefensible, in my opinion. The saving grace, as far as I was concerned, was having Cark station to ourselves for half an hour this morning. Apart from being able to take the pictures we wanted, the major benefit was being able to enjoy the peace and quiet of rural Cumbria for those minutes, and have a bit of gentle, satirical fun - I took a picture of my daughter giving her take on the 'Angel of the North' on the station footbridge, and it appeared on the camera to be just a silhouette, but when I transferred it to the computer earlier, her face was recognisable, so I've had to refrain from putting the photo on the blog. The journey back was, by comparison, very straightforward - all the connections worked out, we both spent a fair chunk of the time asleep, had a nice, if gratuitously overpriced, breakfast in Preston, before finally getting home, courtesy of my wife's 'POETS day', shortly before 4:00 this afternoon, some 33 and a half hours after leaving home. My daughter and I both enjoyed the trip (apart from the overnight malfeasants) and may well do something similar again in future, subject to our not being at loggerheads in the meantime. In case anyone should wonder, there is a good reason why we were able to make so many random-ish train trips without it becoming prohibitively expensive, but I'm not prepared to elucidate, certainly now, probably ever, because it has considerable mileage in security terms.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B