Wales

December 23, 2012:
The morning of Day 9 we caught a taxi and, for the first time in my life, I accidentally went to the driver's seat rather than the passengers because they were on opposite sides of the vehicle. What's worse is that I got in and didn't realize I was on the wrong side until I noticed the steering wheel in front of me. Even after a month in Australia where I actually drove a vehicle, I couldn't keep it straight. The taxi driver and Talaira thought that this was just about the funniest thing ever, and at least it broke the ice and made the drive to the ferry port less awkward for everyone.

When we got there, the sign said that the last passenger boarding had already taken place. We freaked out. The taxi driver took care of unloading our bags while I ran in to implore them to let us on the ferry. They were so casual and seemed confused as to why I was so worked up. Luckily, our tickets had been mailed to me in France before we left and we only had to trade them in. We boarded with no trouble and explored our luxury cruise liner. We had a porridge breakfast in the sunshine. Talaira fell fast asleep and I decided to read on our way to Holyhead. The ferry left at 8:20am.

We got our first glimpse of land at 11:45am. We realized we were getting off in Wales. We're obviously very organized planners.

At 12:50pm, we took a train from Holyhead to Crewe which arrived at 3pm. We were supposed to spend nearly five hours in Crewe, but luckily asked one of the train managers who said he didn't even know if there would be a train then (which is what our tickets told us) so we were allowed to take a train after only half an hour from Crewe to Nuneaton. Finally, we took a train from Nuneaton to London Euston station. We got in at 8pm rather than 10:30pm. You may be asking why we opted for the version of travel that would take us approximately 14 hours when we could have flown. Our tickets cost us £38 each, which was much cheaper than a flight at this time of year. Also, we managed to have amazing weather and saw quite a bit of the Wales countryside. It is practically unheard of to have sunshine in Wales. I had a Welsh student in one of my drama classes choosing the sound of falling rain as representative of his childhood.

Our arrival at London Euston was not the end of our journey. We took a train from London Euston to Clapham Junction. Talaira had a transport card (called an Oyster Card... the names of public transport cards confuse me), but I hadn't manage to figure out how the machine worked in order to get a transport ticket all the way to Mortlake, our destination. We had to get off the train at Clapham Junction, I bought another ticket and we got back on the same train for the last leg of our journey. We had to walk 10 minutes to get to Talaira's family friend's house. It was a really difficult ten minutes.

Travelling is so hard on your body, no matter which option you take. Even if we would have flown, the impact on your body of being at such a high altitude and moving so quickly would have been comparable to what we experienced going at a much more "human" speed. And even though we might have had more time to recover if we'd have flown, we would have missed out on some spectacular views of the countryside. All the travel was enjoyable except for the delay on our train from Nuneaton to London Euston. We were so tired by the time we arrived; we bought Chinese food at the end of the street, wrestled the door open, put on our pajamas and went straight to bed.