{"id":253,"date":"2014-08-26T21:00:03","date_gmt":"2014-08-26T09:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=253"},"modified":"2014-08-27T06:44:54","modified_gmt":"2014-08-26T18:44:54","slug":"over-the-irish-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"Over The Irish Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t know why I bother setting an alarm; I’m always awake 20 minutes before the bloody thing anyway, even if I don’t want to be.<\/p>\n

Packing up the last of the room went well, as far as I know, and hit the lobby a bit after 6, to hand in my room key\/card & get a taxi. Said taxi driver didn’t like the look of the weather, & thought it’d be a rough trip, but it’s not been too bad so far; Rougher than the trip to Ireland, though not by much.
\nIt could be that 50,000 tons of car ferry is difficult to throw around. <\/p>\n

It’s a bit tricky to photograph weather that’s not there, but here’s my attempt;
\n
\"20140826-191409.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"20140826-191431.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I was too early for hotel breakfast, unfortunately, but I kind of wanted to get to the ferry terminal in plenty of time, and figured I could get something on the ferry itself.
\nThis proved to be … tricky.
\nIt’s a full ferry, and while I can see one of the food-dispensing nozzles<\/del> places, in the almost two hours I’ve been sitting here I have not yet seen the end of the queue get close to the counter. In fact, I cannot even see<\/em> the end.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’ll have more luck later on, or on the train.<\/p>\n

Time Passes<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, that line never shrank.
\nTurns out that the fast ferry was cancelled, so the slow ferry was delayed. And crowded. And late.<\/p>\n

Missed my train from Holyhead by quite a lot, but the nice man at the ticket office told me that it’d be fine; Just tell them that the ferry was late.
\nI’m on the train to Euston, so let’s see how this goes.<\/p>\n

ticktickticktick<\/p>\n

Have made it past Bangor, though did move carriages; They announced which was the ‘unreserved’ carriage after<\/em> the train was in motion.<\/p>\n

This is a crowded train, and it’s all the fault of those worthless irresponsible ferry passengers clogging up the system. The unreserved carriage is full, and there are people standing & sitting in the vestibules; They’ve announced, on a couple of occasions, that they’ve received authorisation to let people get off & board the next train, in an hours time, to reduce crowding.
\nNot sure anyone took them up on it.
\nWhen we get to London I’ll have to extract my luggage from Carriage A, where I first boarded, as it was already crowded enough that moving it through the train to Carriage C, for unreserved seats, would have been a nightmare.
\nAnd it’s not like there was any large luggage space left.<\/p>\n

OK, so I made it to London intact, & even found my luggage again.
\nInterestingly, nobody actually looked at the tickets for the train trip, other than the chap at the station who said “It’ll be fine; Get on at platform one & tell them the ferry was late”.
\nI kept wondering whether I was supposed to be on the train at all, given that my tickets were very specific about which trains to catch.
\nAs a bonus, I didn’t have to change at Chester, which was convenient.<\/p>\n

I’d picked the hotel because it was close (within 500m)<\/em> to St. Pancras station, though due to cost & wildly variable reviews, it’s next to Euston station. I hadn’t realised how<\/strong> close until I walked out the side entrance & found myself across the street from the hotel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know why I bother setting an alarm; I’m always awake 20 minutes before the bloody thing anyway, even if I don’t want to be. Packing up the last of the room went well, as far as I know, and hit the lobby a bit after 6, to hand in my room key\/card & […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday-2014"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-45","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}