Thursday Travel Tales: Scotland Trip

Zach and I spent a summer studying abroad in college (that’s actually how we met). We traveled all over Europe on that trip, but for this post I’m going to focus on our trip to Scotland. For this particular portion of the trip, Zach and I were staying at Oxford University in England attending classes. We got the weekends off though so we could travel anywhere we wanted. For this particular weekend we thought it would be really cool to realize our dream of taking an overnight train. I’ve never been on those sleeper car trains you see in the movies so I thought this would be a good chance for that. Also, we had the rail pass so we didn’t have to worry about buying tickets in advance.

Quick note: at this time in my life I was 19, and my planning skills weren’t very well honed, so I would say our plan for this weekend trip was rough at best. The plan was to take the train as far north as we could get. Then it would be nighttime, and we’d ride the train back to London. We wanted to get as far away from London as possible so that the train ride back would be about 6 hours. We assumed that since the train was going to be riding at around midnight, it would magically be a sleeper train. Also, we made this whole plan without checking any train schedules. Zach had seen a midnight train to London on the schedule once, so we assumed all cities in the UK had midnight trains heading to London. Crazy, I know.

So on Saturday morning Zach, his friend Varun, and I boarded the train from Oxford to Edinburgh. We spent the day walking around the city of Edinburgh, which was nice, but all I really remember from that part of the trip is that we tried to go on a hike outside the city, but then it started pouring down rain and we were stuck on an exposed trail in skimpy ponchos getting attacked by rain and wind. We made our way back to the city and the rain eventually stopped, but by that point the cold had set in, so we were soaking wet and freezing. Also, for some reason by the time we got back to the city everything was closing, so there weren’t many places for us to go inside to get warm. (I remember there were a few restaurants open but they were too expensive for us.) We managed to get cheap pizza from one place before it closed, then we had to eat it outside on the cold street. By this point we were wet and cold and ready for our awesome sleeper train experience.

Since our plan was to get as far north as possible, we took another train to Aberdeen. We arrived to the city safely, then checked the schedule for the next train - it was leaving at 5:30am the next morning. Uh oh. 

At this point we started to realize that checking the train schedule ahead of time may have been a good idea. Sleeper trains are actually a rare thing and I think you can only find them on certain routes. Also, I'm pretty sure you have to purchase those tickets in advance and can't just use a rail pass.

So we got kicked out of the train station since it was closing, and we found ourselves stuck in Aberdeen for a night, which is a super small city with a pretty sketchy night life. We felt uneasy staying in the city near the night clubs, so we headed to the beach to sleep. I mentioned earlier that we were too cheap to go inside a restaurant in Edinburgh to get warm, so paying money for a hotel was definitely out of the question (which is CRAZY! How expensive could it have been? We would have been splitting it three ways, so I bet the hotel would have been $50 max). Anyway, we tried sleeping on the beach because we thought that would be pretty glamorous, but it was SO COLD (remember, we’re still damp at this point and the northern tip of Scotland is not a warm place). Then we went to a nearby park and I slept inside a tunnel on the playground shielded from the wind while Zach and Varun slept cuddled together nearby. In the night some youths came by (I think it was a drug deal), so we tried to stay hidden. We did end up making it to the morning alive.

We took the next train we could to London and then slept a ton on Sunday to make up for our terrible night’s sleep before classed started back. So here's the morale of the story: (1) ALWAYS check public transportation schedules before your trip, especially if the purpose of your trip revolves around said public transportation (2) splurging for a hotel is always a good idea, sleeping outside like a hobo is not fun (3) northern Scotland is a weird place, it's freezing in the summer and the sun never sets at night.

Here are some pictures from the trip:

The group in our ponchos. We're still smiling because it hasn't started raining yet.

Here are Zach and Varun sleeping on the playground. You can also see the edge of the tunnel I was crouched in trying to avoid the wind.

This is at about 4:30am after a rough night's sleep. I'm very excited that the train station is almost open.