Storyline: A Glimpse of Scotland
Ali gave us a sleepless night. You know Ali. No, not the loud neighbour upstairs. Ali was the first “named” storm of the season in Britain. We read about his progress in the online newspapers. He came with winds of over 100 miles an hour and lashing rains. (Diana: Ali’s approach was why we were blown away from Arthur’s Seat the previous day. But the shopping was good: I managed to buy a pair of shoes and exchange them twice in the downpours and winds. Alex held me tightly.)
Two people were killed – one by a falling tree and one when the caravan she was sleeping in was blown over a cliff. We kept reading as the day progressed (other than the repeat visits to the shoe store, we weren’t going out much). All trains out of Edinburgh and Glasgow were cancelled, and we were supposed to hop onto our train to Leeds the next morning at 8 o’clock. We should have stopped reading then, but you know how it is with disasters, you want to know the extent and the effects on your plans. We read on. No trains were running between Edinburgh and York (the station just before Leeds): the east coast route that we were to take was shut down due to severed overhead wires. Scotland was completely cut off.
Time for some contingency planning. We had to check out of our Airbnb flat in the morning and we were booked on a charter flight out of Leeds-Bradford to warmer climes in the afternoon. So we either had to get to Leeds by noon or find a place to stay in Edinburgh for an extra night or two and make alternative arrangements to get to a warm destination where Diana’s bones would not ache.
Options: bus to Leeds (nothing that would get us there in time for our flight); train down the west coast via Carlisle (closed until 7am at the earliest. Passengers were advised not to travel the next day); fly in the morning (ha! We would have to go through Ireland or, believe it or not, Spain!! And it would take between 15 and 21 hours. But it would be pretty cheap at £140 each. Either way we wouldn’t be able to catch our charter from Leeds). Then we noticed that there would be a status update in an hour. We waited. Meanwhile Diana researched some options for an extended stay in Edinburgh or a flight to any warm destination.
The update arrived. No change. There was a west coast train scheduled to leave Edinburgh just after 6am. It might not be cancelled as the closed section was a couple of hours south. We decided to sleep for a few hours and check for further updates. We were both awake before our 3am alarm went off. No change in status, so we napped for a couple more hours, got ourselves going and headed to the station at 6:30. We figured that was the place to be in order to take any opportunity that arose.
I’m writing this from our train. Yep, the one we were scheduled to take in the first place. Diana’s planning was, as usual, impeccable as she must have foreseen the storm and planned our trip for the following day. I think that she just cut it a bit too close.
In order to get a good night’s sleep before travelling though, we just have to learn: never read the damn newspaper!
Diana:
Had I not opened The Guardian while Alex was walking in the storm and photographing the rainbows, we would have gone to bed on time, woken up for our train, gone to the train station and boarded it clueless of the havoc it had created. Only on board we would have learned from the overflow of fellow passengers standing in any possible place that there had been cancelled trains etc. As the tea trolley man announced several times, “If you want some food and drinks come to carriage ‘F’ folks, because there are lots of people, lots of luggage going to lots of places today”. He was stationary because he couldn’t get trough the crowds…you had to wriggle your way through to him if you wanted something…. We arrived at the airport on time for another downpour, so much so that when we retrieved our suitcases at other end they were soaked from their short terminal-to-plane trip.
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