Well then, seems every time I sit down and write about my Wales trip, my laptop battery dies, I get distracted by work or something else comes up. So yeah, I’ve been a bit on the busy side, and lots being going on.
Ah, Wales, let me start by saying this about it, it’s an absolutely beautiful little country within a country, and I did very much enjoy the parts of the trip that went right, which is thankfully, Saturday evening and all of Sunday, but Saturday morning and day, oh my oh my.
I didn’t go to sleep the night before, thinking I’d probably sleep through my 5am alarm, so by the time Saturday started, I was already exhausted. I planned the trip with Anne, and we went to the meeting point for the tour in Canterbury together, where we met Rachelle, who is an altogether lovely person and helped make Saturday enjoyable. She’s another exchange student from the USA at Christ Church, but I hadn’t met her before as she lives in a different part of the city, and is in the history modules. We weren’t sure how we were being picked up, so I ended up calling the tour company to ask, Martin, the one who seemed to be in charge of the tour arrangements, was surprised that there was no one there yet to meet us by 6:20am, so he arranged another cab.
Said cab finally showed up about ten minutes later, and although we were unsure of ourselves because he kept asking us where we were going, the tour company said that it was the right cab and that it would take us from Canterbury to the bus meeting point in London. Now, I’m very prone to falling asleep when I’m a passenger in a car, plus I was tired so I almost immediately fell asleep. I probably woke up on and off as we drove, but when I finally came to the driver told us we had arrived in our location, we looked around, it was a very very very very rural town. No way was that place London, and the driver kept saying we were in London despite us telling him flat out, no this was not London. We were in Smarden we found out, which is part of Ashford, we had been driving for two hours at this point, while London was only an hour and a half or so away from Canterbury and they were connected by a pretty straightforward motorway. We were lost, and the driver was not paying attention to us, so we called the tour company again to find out where we were and how we could get out of there and to London. Finally, Martin from the tour company told us to get the driver to call his company, and that we needed to go to the nearest service station we could find.
The driver was getting agitated, yelling at his higher up on the phone that he was in the right place, that he was at the place his satnav had taken him, he kept asking where we were supposed to be going (the tour company arranged this part, we didn’t actually have a clue), kept passing his satnav to Anne who was getting frustrated as well because of everything going badly. It took us another hour to find a service station, with Rachelle and I watching the signs and being extreme backseat drivers, telling the driver to turn down this exit, or get into that lane, because the man was determined to take us to London, instead of a service station like he was instructed by his boss.
Finally, we arrived in Essex, and waited in a service station for another driver to come pick us up and take us to where we needed to go, the tour company had called back to say that the tour had moved on, but we would be caught up, and stated that we were getting a refund for the hassle we had gone through. Finally, our second driver arrived in a nice Mercedes-Benz and told us that he was taking us all the way from the service station we were at to Chester on the border of Wales to meet with the rest of the tour.
This is the car we traveled in from the station to Chester, that's in Chester, and I’ll have to continue this later, because this is getting long!
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