…and ferries, and buses and the Tube (or Metro)!
This is the first post of many of our end of summer trip to Scotland and Portugal. I assume it will be the first of many, and I think I’ll follow the same approach as our summer road-trip - start with the content and photos from my phone, and add more photos later. That seemed to work out pretty well. It’s taken me a little longer than expected to get to these posts, and I suspect it’s going to take a while to get through them all!
Standing at the bus stop outside our place in Vancouver, waiting to start our adventure!
Our trip, while covering more than two weeks, was going to be a busy one. We might need a vacation from our vacation when we get home! To start, we were headed to Scotland. I have always wanted to go (I had been to Glasgow once before, just for a weekend) and explore more of the country, so for this trip we decide to head out to Islay, an island on the west coast where the scotch I love comes from. It’s a bit of a pilgrimage for me.
Unfortunately, getting there is hard - hence the title of the post. We had a fairly tight timeline for all the stages of our journey and we could not afford for anything to go wrong along the way. Particularly in the first stage of the trip, getting out to Islay and then on to Portugal. Hopefully the travel gods would favour us.
So let’s step back a bit…
Planes: We left Vancouver on Friday evening, with our flight departing at 7:45 pm. We took a bus to the SkyTrain, then the SkyTrain to the airport - we figured we were doing a lot of transit on this trip, so we might as well save some money and start off on public transit. It gave us a good way to test out our bags for the longer journey.
As usual, we were pretty early to the airport for our flights. We like to give ourselves lots of time, which also meant we could hang out in the lounge waiting for our flight to board.
Hanging out in the lounge, waiting for our flight to board.
We were flying on Air Canada to London, and everything went as smoothly as it can. We had OK seats on the plane, the flight departed on time and there was a big tailwind for us, meaning we actually arrived early into Heathrow. That never happens!
I slept for a few hours on the plane; Jus didn’t do as well, which is the reverse of our normal approach. Still, we were early!
On arrival, the customs process was quick and much improved from the last time I was through Heathrow. They’ve installed new automated passport scanners, and while there was a queue, it was reasonable and efficient. Our bags were waiting for us and we were on our way!
Tube: From there, it was a long walk through the airport over to the Tubestation. The timing was not much different using the Heathrow Express and much cheaper! We took the new Elizabeth Line to Tottenham Court Road station, switched to the Northern Line to Euston, where we were picking up the train to Edinburgh. We had about 4 hours to make our train, a little more with the quick pass through the airport, and we were at Euston with time to spare. Strangely, everything was going to plan…
We took the new Elizabeth Line tube from Heathrow into the city, to get to Euston for our train to Edinburgh.
With the time to spare, we decide to walk over to Kings Cross Station. It was about a 15 minute walk away, and Justine wanted to see the Harry Potter sculpture at platform 9 3/4. Plus it was good to get some exercise after 9 hours on a plane. The weather was warm and a bit humid, but the walk did us good. We were surprised by the ridiculous line up for photos, so we skipped that and stole a quick pick from outside the queues.
As part of the Harry Potter books, one of the main plot points across the books is how they get on the train to Hogwarts every year, through Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Station. They have built this fun sculpture between platforms 9 and 10 at the real King’s Cross.
And not surprisingly, it draws a crowd. There’s a queue (how could there not be in the UK…) and they even provide props for people wanting to take pictures. We were not willing to wait, but it was fun to watch the craziness.
The pub we had lunch at.
King’s Cross was a little further from Euston than I remembered. It was about a 15 minute walk, carrying all our gear and it was pretty warm. Combined with just coming off a 9 1/2 hour flight from Vancouver, we were feeling it by the time we had done our little side excursion.
So we headed back towards Euston and stopped at a pub for some lunch. It was right outside our train station, which was perfect. Lunch was typically English, I had a nice pint of beer and then we headed to the train station to catch our train. We made a quick stop at the Marks and Spencer in train station to grab some food and snacks for the long train ride ahead of us.
A proper pint of beer…
Trains: The train up to Edinburgh was lengthy - 6 hours - and was getting us to our hotel around 11:00 p.m. It was going to be a long day. But it’s such a lovely way to travel. I had forgotten how much I miss traveling by train. It has been a while for me - I guess it was Bordeaux, the last time
I took one any distance. We had paid for upgraded seats - not quite first class, but reserved and premium seating. That was a great decision as Justine discovered part way through our trip. It seems that the standard cabins were jammed to the point of people standing in the aisles. Thankfully we didn’t need to deal with my of that!
Our seats were pretty great - we had single seats facing each other across a table, which was perfect.
The fully stocked bar service was welcome.
The trip itself was nice. We got to watch the scenery drift by, have a drink or two and a meal, as we made our way north to Scotland. We played cards and chatted, and the time went by quickly. Sadly, the sun went down pretty early in the trip, so we lost a lot of the scenery going by.
We got into Edinburgh at about 10:30 p.m., and it took us a bit of time to figure out the bus we needed to take over to our hotel near the airport and car rental. It was about 11:00 when we arrived, got checked in and then it was straight to bed. It was a long day of travel, but everything went smoothly and our trip was off to a great start.