Saturday, March 29, 2014

Coventry (Southam) and Salisbury (Stonehenge)

We left Edinburgh bright and early that morning; we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to catch our 5:30 long train ride to Coventry, England! We made it to the station with plenty of time to spare, or so we thought. I swear the train gods were working against us that morning. I couldn't get my phone to connect to the internet to look up our booking number and print off our tickets. I could have SWORN I had already printed them off, but when we got to the station, they were no where to be found. When I asked the man working at the counter if he could look it up for us, he said that the only thing that could be done was for me to email him our pdf file of the tickets and he could print it off there. Of course, like mentioned above, I could NOT get the internet on my phone. It was sooo incredibly frustrating. Finally, the worker told us to just run for the train and see if they would take our copy saved on my phone once we got on. This was 1 minute before the train left, by the way. So we take off and literally get in front of the train door and....closed! Oh man, I was sooo angry. I threw a little hissy fit because of how mad I was. We had to go back and buy more tickets, which cost a small fortune, by the way! Such a joke. I'm getting mad all over again just thinking about it!
The train ride to Coventry was relatively unexciting; I fell asleep in a really creative, and impressive if I do say so myself, position! Slept most of the journey. Woke up, stared out the window for a while, finished my book, "Walk Two Moons," and repeated, but with different books. 
When we finally got to Coventry, it was raining...surprise! We left the train station immediately and ended up getting a cab to our hotel since it was outside the boundaries for public transport. That's what I get for trying to save "money" (points) on a hotel. Save on the hotel, pay for the transport! Sometimes my insane cheapness doesn't workout quite like anticipated. Okay, on the way over we started chatting with the cab driver who told us he would take us to our hotel, wait for us while we checked in and dropped every thing off, and then drive us to Southam, drive us around Southam and then back to our hotel at Coventry for a great price, which was in pounds, which is a great price if you make pounds, but we make dollars, so it wasn't so great! 
The drive there ended up being the second most fun thing we did on this journey, second only to our nerd fest at the gaming store in Edinburgh! That driver was HILARIOUS! We found out his whole life story, which included: He was from Kashmere, but has lived in Coventry almost his entire life; he has 6 kids, but is not Irish or Catholic; he doesn't drink; he got married at 18; and most importantly, he loves flying because he LOVES airplane food! But seriously, this guy was a riot! He had just as much fun as we did driving around the tiny town of Southam and taking pictures of us! We totally made him hop in a picture!
Our hotel in Coventry was surprisingly not awful. It was a pretty old and slightly stinky Holiday Inn, but we got put in the "executive room," so it was tolerable. But really, it actually was pretty nice. I couldn't fall to sleep that evening because I had slept all day on the train. It was a lot of fun when I was still rolling around in bed at almost 1 am, watching some totally weird "iron chef" but for hair dressers show where they had to give their model a "mohican," not mohawk according to the host because, and I quote "Americans say mohawk because they are lazy!" Jerk! I finally got sick of the show and decided to go workout. That did not workout at all. I didn't have tennis shoes, so I figured I would just look like a freak and go workout in my gold glittering toms. Did I mention another reason why I couldn't sleep was because my husband snores like, well, I don't know! Like nothing you've ever heard! It's out of control! Back to working out. I left the room, went downstairs, the gym was closed, left my key in the room, couldn't get a new key because I didn't have my id, and couldn't wake Nathan up over the snoring. Needless to say, I spent about 30 minutes outside that door in the stinky hallway waiting for the hubs to wakeup. I just kept sending him messages via Facebook and eventually the persistent vibrating was enough to wake him from his blissful coma!
Alright, next morning we left the Holiday Inn and took another cab back to the train station. The cab driver this time around was just as friendly and fun as the last driver. Coventry cab drivers should win an award for funnest and most friendly cabbies! We FINALLY made our train this time! Yay! We were off to Salisbury to make a quick trip to Stonehenge and then on to London!

Salisbury was soooooo beautiful! Nathan and I were so bummed once we started riding our gigantic double decker tour bus to Stonehenge through the city and seeing all the amazing sites! We want to go back to the UK just to spend time there. 
We made it out to Stonehenge. It was INSANELY freezing and rainy and there were like 3 different GIGANTIC groups of teenage school kids visiting. It was a little obnoxious and, well, they really kind of ruined the experience a little bit! Stonehenge really was amazing, though. I have been dreaming of visiting that place for a LONG time! On the way back to the station, Nathan and I were the only ones on the bus, so we did absolutely nothing exciting and sat in the front row on top and watched and wondered how the driver didn't run over people, cars, and entire buildings! 



We made it back to Salisbury in one piece and then went straight to the station to catch our train to London! Yay! It was definitely a little bit confusing figuring out our tickets, but this great attendant helped us, which made it so that we didn't have to wait an hour and a half to catch our train and got to London much earlier!

No comments: