...But who needs nails, anyway?

Well, I have made it to the Isle of Man! Just! In a series of close calls! I had to catch four different trains and one ferry, and I'm still stressed! Arrggh!

Hehe, not that stressed, but it was quite a day. I had between 45 minutes and eight minutes to get off one train, find the other and board it, so I was counting on the British Railways to come through for me, cause I couldn't afford to be late. Hence the stress.

It all started at 4.45am which didn't help. This was an especially strenuous wake-up call (just my phone alarm, although it turns out it has no alarm tone which is not irritating) because I hadn't really woken up at any time before 8.30 / 9am for the past two weeks. My excuse is that I was sleeping off the horrendously early mornings we endured during both of my tours (amounting to about a solid two months!). Failing that, my excuse is that Tony was doing it.

Anyway, I wake up at this ungodly hour, notice it is light (bizzarre, huh? I think they must only have dark from about 10pm till 4am. No wonder the farmers are so surly.), get dressed, try to put on my pack which seems to be 10kg heavier than it was when I last put it on (that, or I am 10kgs' worth of less fit), try again, finally get the damned thing on, and try to sneak downstairs while my footsteps resound like some mythical giant looking for food ("I smell the blud of an English-mun!") to wait for my taxi.

It is about 5.15 (still in the a.m.) when I make it in to the living room. I have time to remove my pack, wonder how on earth I'm going to get it on again, and write a note to Tony's lovely flatmates before the phone rings. I lunge for it, knowing it's my taxi and trying to not let it ring for too long - if my giant's feet didn't do it, I don't want an automated phone call to wake them. Downstairs, lock the door on the way out, look at the key in my hand... Hmm. Hopefully they found it - I did the only thing I really could do and posted it through the post-hole in their door.

The taxi was mind-blowingly expensive, but luckily they put it on my credit card so I can pretend it didn't happen. I got to the station in plenty of time, found my platform (who ever heard of a train station with platforms upstairs? Yeah, okay, but still...). I got on the train and looked around for somewhere to put my pack. Nowhere. A nice young man told me that it would be fine on the seat beside me as only mad people would catch a train at this hour of the morning. I heartily agreed, and we chatted for an hour or so until he arrived at his station, whereuopn I went and got some (neither fresh nor reasonably priced - stupid lying advertisements) breakfast.

It was all going quite well, I thought. We seemed to be going along at a reasonable rate of knots, so I decided I could have a little nap. About an hour later I was woken by the sound of some strange but rather lound and insistent beeping coming over the intercom. My heart sunk. "If it's anything like on the busses at home..." Sure enough, a few minutes later: "Ladies and gentlemen, this train is having some technical difficulties and will have to be resigned at the next station." Bugger. "Oh well," I thought, "Surely an exchange of trains can be accomplished with minimal fuss". Hahaha.

We swapped trains, after a lot of waiting around for some (undoubtedly important :p ) reason or other, and were underway again. We had one station left to go before I had a scheduled change for the first time, and I had only ten minutes before that next train left. I was clutching my seat and trying to reason with myself that jibbering aloud, or anything in a similar vein, would not make the train go any faster.

I got off the train with two minutes to spare and a slightly panicked look on my face. I ran (well, as much as running is possible when with every step you are wondering if the paving is going to crack under your massive weight, or if your joints will go first) to the conductor to ask him where I should get my next train. He smiled at me and said, "Yours is the next one to this platform". Oh, thank god. I wobbled happily over to a seat and waited for my first train to get on its way and my new train to arrive.

This one was fairly uneventful, except for the fact that the driver seemed to have an aversion to going at any sort of speed. I'm sure I wasn't the only one white-knuckled at the end of the trip. A nice, generous gap of 45 minutes had been eaten down to a mere five by the time I arrived.

Back on a platform somewhere in England, I looked at my ticket for the next train and noticed that my seat number was "OOC", or possibly "00C", given that I had previously been in seats called things like "42A". I wondered what kind of seat that was. I showed a conductor and he seemed to have no idea, telling me to just "find a seat anywhere". This proved to be easier said than done, so I ended up sitting disconsolately on the floor outside the toilet in a seatless non-compartment full of people whose fluorescent tabards proclaimed them to be 'Railway Police', and just outside the completely empty First Class comparment whose large, plush purple seats stared mockingly at me (oh yes, seats can stare). "Well, this is going to be a great two hours," I thought. When the man came throught to check our tickets, I decided to ask him where my seat was, pointing out that this was a ticket where I was meant to get a seat. He looked momentarily at a loss, then said to me, "Just go an sit through there for me, will ya loov?". He nodded toward the First Class compartment. W00t!

I knew that at the next station I only had eight minutes to find and board the correct train. I'd made it in less than that at the previous two stations, but I'd also been a lot later in arriving than that at those stations. I tried to rest and distract myself until we got there, which mostly worked. I still had five minutes when we arrived, so I was pretty happy. I found the train with two minutes to spare, found a seat, and grinned. This was my final train, and it was going to Heysham Port! I managed to stop short of jiggling in my seat and singing "I'm go-ing to the Isle of Maa-aan, I'm go-ing to the Isle of Maa-aan", but it was a close thing.

The only thing left to worry about was getting on the ferry. This wouldn't have usually worried me, because this train would get me to the port an hour before my check-in time. However, I didn't have a ticket. I had booked it - the previous October, acutally - but my travel agent (bless) hadn't managed to organise the booking until I had left the country. All I had was a confirmation email... and I'd forgotten to print it out. I had written down the reference number, but all of a sudden I wasn't sure it would be enough.

I was first off the train and first to the check-in desk at the port - possibly due to my having looked at a map on the internet before I left to find out where it was in relation to the train station. I find I tend to do a lot more homework when I'm travelling by myself - you get just that much more paranoid because you have no-one else to blame. I stomped heavily up to the check-in desk past signs asking you to present your ticket there, got out the page which my reference number was on, and smiled with all the confidence I could muster at the clerk. "Hi, I have a booking for the 2.15 sailing this afternoon. I have my reference number." I managed to look fairly confident, and not to add "but nothing else". I gave it, got a boarding pass, and nearly skipped over to the waiting room. I valued my ankles too much to actually have tried it with my pack on.

The boat left more or less on time (well, less really but I was in too bouyant a mood to care) and I arrived at the Isle of Man. A nice taxi lady took me up the hill to Mrs. Cartmell's house, whose name is Jeanette. I am her only homestayer, but Jeanette's four-year-old daughter and Tatiana, her au pair, make up the rest of the household. So far I have figured out how to get to the town centre and the racetrack without getting lost (mapmapmapgood), and I have walked the track from Quarterbridge Road, up Bray hill, through the Grandstand and up to where the Mountain Road finishes. Not that that will make sense to more than... um, dad, but still, this is a good thing. Learned cat agrees.

The races start on Saturday when I hope to be in the Grandstand, if I can get tickets. Until then I will be watching practices every evening at about 6pm. There are SO MANY cool motorbikes here. Squee.

So, I made it! It was a nail-biter, but who really needs nails, anyway?