We had a trip to the UK, this time up to Scarborough and York.<\/p>\n
For some reason, my travel anxiety was particularly bad this time around (maybe because the trip involved so many<\/em> logistics: the usual airport bus, a flight, a tube ride, a walk, a 2 hour train ride, a 1 hour train ride, and then a walk to finally get to the first hotel), and the hotel had a “preferred” checkin time of “by 5 PM”, which we were already going to miss by around 30 minutes based on our booked train times. Unfortunately, the anxiety became somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n On the flight out, for the first time in my life, I forgot my boarding pass in the security bin. (I blame the fact that the scanners were broken, so they sent our bags through like 5 times, and my brain was not in a state to process things at that point.) I thought I’d lost my passport at one point (I put it in my pocket but not in the usual holder). And I tapped out of the tube “wrong” which made me worry that we’d be mischarged for the ride. (All things that wouldn’t have happened if my brain hadn’t been in a weird state.)<\/p>\n Then, of course, our 2-hour train arrived 6 minutes late for what was a 7 minute connection time… we did our best (the conductor told us to walk to the front of the C car which would put us right next to an overhead bridge, and then run for it) but arrived at our platform just in time to watch our next train pull out of the station, so we had an extra hour to burn before the next train.<\/p>\n (On the plus side, if you’re delayed more than 30 minutes on a train in the UK, you’re apparently eligible for a partial refund of your fare paid. Apparently a delay of 60 minutes would result in a full<\/em> refund, but we missed the 60 minutes by arriving into our final station 2 minutes early, which is just par for the course with this trip.)<\/p>\n The transit back to the airport was fortunately uneventful, but I’m still kind of amazed at how easy transit in the UK is. A 2-hour (direct!) train ride followed by an 80 minute tube ride feels surprisingly effortless, and the general frequency of trains for those kinds of distances is so nice.<\/p>\n (Incidentally, I’m realizing that my brain experiences different travel anxiety for every “leg” of a journey, and separately tries to mitigate for each one, which is perhaps why the long list of different legs on the way out was so problematic. At least we didn’t have an airport transfer. Thus, therapy continues to be useful, even while I’m not actively going at the moment, because it gives me tools to better articulate my brain, which lets me start to figure out what to do about it. Go to therapy, everyone. It’s fantastic.)<\/p>\n Oh, and I also got food poisoning on our first full day there, so I spent like half the trip being unhappy and unable to really properly enjoy the British food, including the amazing breakfasts (and vegetarian haggis) from our first hotel. So that was great. (It was from Indian food, too, which turned me off having more Indian food for the entire trip. Boo.)<\/p>\n I also do not recommend going on an 8-mile hike the morning you wake up with severe food poisoning. Between my stomach and guts being in active revolt, and the dehydration making me want to faint every time I stopped walking, it was not a good time. 0\/10 would not do again.<\/p>\n In any case (and other than the food poisoning), the trip was nice. We saw a partial eclipse in Scarborough (which mostly manifested itself as “outside is weirdly dark for early evening”), got to experience a British seaside town (really nice and clean and full of surprisingly expansive beaches), explored all of the old parts of York (including the Minster, which is extremely impressive), saw a friend, enjoyed (and brought back) tons of tea and tea biscuits, and ate tons of meal deals (which I still think are just about the best deal for tourists, and have a surprising amount of variety).<\/p>\n Also elderflower and lemon cake. I want more of that cake. We need more elderflower things in the US.<\/p>\n I’m also proud of the fact that my checked bag on the way home was 22.9 kilos out of the allowed 23 kilos. I was completely estimating without a scale or any real reference (other than the fact that the bag was 15 kilos on the way out) so I’m super glad we didn’t have to re-pack the bag at the airport.<\/p>\n Also also BA apparently switched the aircraft on the way back, so the seats we’d selected on checkin were not the seats we got. We weren’t the only ones, either… a bunch of families got separated, and there was a ton of moving around after boarding was complete. This ended up working out well for us, since the other person in our row moved to be with his wife, so we ended up with a row of 3 seats to ourselves on what was otherwise a mostly full flight. I just don’t understand why BA can’t seat people together when they’re on the same reservation. It wasn’t like there was a lack of rows to do it, since people were able to self-rearrange to make it happen. (At least BA has significantly better food and snacks than any US carrier. Mmm caramel chocolates and chocolate digestives.)<\/p>\n Photos, uh…. when I get to them. They’ll be at photos<\/a> at some point, probably. (Or maybe not, because I’ve been bad at dealing with photos recently.)<\/p>\n Life (other than my self-sabotaging brain) is amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We had a trip to the UK, this time up to Scarborough and York. For some reason, my travel anxiety was particularly bad this time around (maybe because the trip involved so many logistics: the usual airport bus, a flight, … Continue reading