Meetings and Eurostars

After a while waiting for some sign that my fellow travelers had already begun their own journey’s I decide to attempt to contact them myself. No response from any number stored in my emergency phone and I started to panic again. I tried to be more useful and fill my time by picking up the train tickets, which turned out not to be possible without Jay’s bank card. While doing this i realised that our train was delayed and all of a sudden I was in Manchester again waiting but going nowhere. Just then as I sat down cold, grey and dejected James rung. We were to meet outside WHSmiths. I walked, again, the entire length of the station to find him. He was 100 metres behind where I started. His mum was really nice and she took she took some great hyped up ‘lets go!’ type action snaps. Around 5 minutes later Jay rang. He had arrived back from his aborted first attempt out and was now outside WHSmiths. Sarah was next after meeting and saying some final goodbyes to her mum and our holiday could begin properly. Jay handed out some presents for me from Katie and Doug, Alex and Kavita. They were amazing – I only opened them later but I was so blown away by the gifts that I just had to mention it.

We checked into the Eurostar lounge where the temperature was through the roof. I suggested we relax having just made it through passport control and dropped our bags when the call was made to proceed to the platform. The queue which I thought gave us twenty minutes wasn’t for our train and when we realised we had to scoop our bags up and burst past ticket check. At first we ran as little joke, we couldn’t miss the first train! When we realised we were heading in the wrong direction down the platform the joke stopped being funny and we sprinted to our coach and jumped on board. For some reason we had been bumped up to first class, our fellow travelers didn’t seem to happy with it as we puffed and panted and pushed our massive bags into our seats. The hostess on board wasn’t best pleased either. Still, the service was worth all the downward looks. Free champagne, free wine and beer, free food and over sized chairs. A great way to begin our trip.

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