We’re spending the weekend in Aviemore in the Cairngorms and I’m writing this from the train. Oh, how I love trains, even all the bad things like when the people sitting nearby seem to fart the whole way or when a group of rowdy youths gets on stinking of cigarettes or when you go to the toilet and after finishing the task, smother your hands in soap from the soap dispenser only to discover there’s no water to wash it off with. It’s all part of the adventure.
We always reserve seats. Our seats were in coach B so when the train arrived we got on coach B. But our seats were not in coach B. Someone told us there was a second coach B and a third coach B and maybe even a fourth so we walked through three carriages until we reached a dead-end. Somewhere in Scotland are four trains all missing coach B because our train stole them all. The sequence of coaches was D,B,A,B,B,B.
The dead-end was mid-train but the only way to get through to the coach on the other side was to climb out a window, crawl along the roof and then back in through a window in the next coach. We decided not to do this. Another option was to wait for the next station, get off, walk around to coach B then get back on again. The third option was to sit in the vacant seats in first class. And this is exactly what we did 🙂 Fortunately the nice conductor must have understood the difficulty we faced and let us stay there.
A couple of hours later and the kids have watched “Spiderman” and Ben and I haven’t had to do any driving. It’s marvellous. We’re nearly there and hoping to see some snow, which is highly likely given it has been snowing for much of the day in Aviemore.
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