I don't think life gets any better than this. I really don't. I slept in forever (in a bed, no offense to my host, but my LORD that bed felt good after 4 days of floor). Then I got up, trekked out looking for a cafe and found this great little spot that made a fantastic cafe au lait and has some of the best almond pastry I've ever had. And I've had a lot of them (yes this means that my diet is pretty much on hold, but since everyone's promised me that I'll lose weight walking so much I don't feel as guilty as I ought.) So now, with my cafe, and my croissant, I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in Dublin and writing this--I could travel for the rest of my life, I really could. I was impressed with myself yesterday, even though I didn't follow directions very well and I just found out that my family would have come to get me from the dock if I'd just checked my email once more before leaving London. Oh well. Hope they're not spazzing...

But this is simply the eye of the storm I suspect, and I'll give you a rundown of my journey from London to Dublin in order to explain myself. It was, yet again, another one of those adventures where I shimmy by on the skin of my teeth (much like getting into college, writing my thesis, graduating from college...). It's gotten so I get used to it now, but the problem with that is it turns into a lack of vigilance. And "Be vigitant, I beseech you," as the superb Dogberry puts it. So here it is, on the Virgin line to Holyhead, Wales:

I have once again gotten myself into quite a scrape. I wonder if my entire life will continue to be nothing but a series of scrapes and near misses. I'm hoping I can get out of this one--I don't know what I'll do if I can't. I woke up late this morning--6.40--so instead of a leisurely stroll to the bus stop, EJ wakes me up and I spring into action, throwing everything on and just barely making the 7 o'clock bus. Then I get confused as to which metro (or tube, rather) to take in--Thinking I'd missed the proper one--the Piccadilly line--because I HAD to have my latte (coffee be damned from now on; never will I go to get it before firmly in place with my travel plans, no matter how exhausted). I then---------------->
------------->Wait, wow--loading docks, like Norfolk, VA.<----------------------

turn my nose up at the Metropolitan line and hop, blythe morning spirit that I am, avec ma cafe et mon pain au choclat, onto the next waiting Piccadilly line and watch the Metro pull away, thinking that by the grace of God I should be able to make it. I pull out my directions for the next tube stop...and immediately grow cold, camisole, Tibetan sweater, velvet blazer and down vest notwithstanding. The Metro line has left and I should have been on it. I scramble out of the carriage with my accoutrements and stand undecided on the platform, and then scramble back in. The Piccadilly line connects with the Metro line at Raynors Lane. I'll catch the next one there.

So at Raynors Lane I disembark into a growing crowd of commuters and stand studying the tube map. I should be okay, I think. Kings Cross/St. Pancras wasn't that far. I've got a bit of time before my 9.10 train to Holyhead. As I stare blankly ahead, chewing the last of my rather stale pastry and sucking the life out of my not-worth-it latte, the voice of the station agent, echoing like God speaking to Moses but with a Cockney accent, rings out from above. Nevermind that I can barely understand one word in ten that these people say. I manage to pick up the word "delay" and the phrase "7.57." My bit of time is slowly being chipped away. I drag myself upstairs to see the station agent and in my most panicked, tragic, stranger-in-a-strange-land-Oh-won't-you-PLEASE-help-me voice I tell them I HAVE to be at Euston station by nine. They both look at me like I'd told them I needed dropped off on the Champs Elysees. "What, nine this morning? Today?" the one says, staring at me. I smile and nod, shards of desperation burrowing into my heart and mey eyes. "You'll never make it" he says with finality. His sidekick, a shorter Indian man with graying hair, assents with a grave and fatalistic air. "A bus, maybe, but the tube's backed up." At this point I begin to wonder how far a walk it might be (London can't be THAT big) and whether God hates me (I am still relatively sure he does). I look at the small Indian man as his companion begins some rapid-fire Cockney into the walkie-talkie. "So there's no way?" I ask him. "Hold on," he gestured to the Cockney, "he's checking." As further floods of commuters charge through the turnstiles------------------>

------------->and I didn't know there were canals around here. I just saw a little sliver of one, with a dark blue houseboat sitting on it. I wonder if gypsies live in there.<-------------------

the taller one returns and says that I should be able to make it. "To Euston Station?" I ask, not quite trusting his suddenly certain and relaxed attitude. "Oh yeah," he says, as though it were a piece of cake and not the insane rush for the border it had been a minute ago. The Indian man chimes in. "Just get off at Euston Square," he says. "Euston Station is about a five minute walk from your left." I thank them profusely and hustle back downstairs.

The glory of rush hour is in its universality. Not only is it everywhere in the world (the London Underground, I would guess, being second only to Beijing or Tokyo in cramped quarters and general inconvenience); it is universal in non-discrimination, in the closeness of the human race, in the overwhelming stress and ire it produces in everyone, regardless of race, sex, color or creed. I have never seen a relaxed commuter; the only relaxed commuter is a dead one. By the time I reach Euston Square my suitcase and I are so pakced in I can't fall over even if I want to. At the Great Portland Street stop I warn the man next to me that I'll be getting out and that I have a bag. He gives me an apprehensive look, no doubt calculating the amount of animosity directed toward anyone who would help this inconvenient American who dared to travel with her bloody suitcase in the middle of the rush. Still, I wiggle my way after the suitcase as it is passed in front of me (nice of them) and deposited without ceremony onto the platform. I call back a thank you and take off for the stairs.

Smoothly, smoothly, my watch shows almost ten of and I know it's fast. I'm banking on some kind of cheap luck to get me through the station and onto the train. With my suitcase tottering precariously on it's two wheels, and it should have been designed better, but oh well, there you are, I get caught up behind a petite woman witha halo of curly black matron-returning-to-the-workforce hair. She manages to block my every attempt to doge around her and finally I grab the suitcase by the handle, pull a duck-and-dodge, and whisk past her toward the station. I get into the line which manages to move along and am immediately told to use the FastTicket Kiosk. I stare down at my paper. It distinctly says, this is not a FastTicket confirmation. Those words are indelibly written on my brain and the tip of my tongue. I trudge off to find the proper check in, which must NOT be a FastTicket kiosk.

I ask 2 more people, and once again my future is wheeling slowly into the past as I bumble about the station, utterly lost. At last I return to the orignal Ticket office and look beseechingly at the three red-jacketed agents? officers? standing there. I walk up to the nearest one--a man who is (fortunately? unfortunately?) not British. Maybe he is French; his face is expressionless and he takes my papers in silence. "Maybe I'm stupid, but I can't find where to get my ticket. But it's not a fast ticket confirmation." I pronounce, certain and sure of that one and only fact. He glances down the page, and points to a paragraph I must have skipped--like many paragraphs in my life. I wonder if it ever said on my grade school report card 'Caitlin has a hard time following directions'--the paragraph that said 'THIS is your fast ticket confirmation number.' "Oh," I say in my tiniest voice. "Oh. I guess I AM stupid." He does not contradict me but follows me to the fast ticket kiosk, probably thinking that I am either visually impaired or incapacitatingly dumb. I have never felt more American in my life. I manage to get the ticket, determine my platform, walk longingly past the first class cars with their empty red velvet seats and white china place settings and climb into a random car, unable (as usual) to locate my car or seat numbers on the ticket. Once I've established that I'm on car E, I establish that I'm supposed to be on Car F. Despite my growing suspicion that I've already passed it, I walk towards the front of the train and get onto another practically deserted car. As I've done so often already today, I prevail upon a total stranger to help me. He tells me that yes, it looks like I ought to be in Car F, but that,especially when the cars are empty-ish, he usually just sits close to the front of the train. So with many silent prayers of thanks, I settle into a four seater with a table top and hope they won't tell me to move.

They haven't yet. My latest scrape is resolved--the ticket I bought, a Saver ticket, must be shown with a railcard, and I don't have one. But the conductor came through as I made up my eyes, was jocular all around and accused me of watching him in my compact mirror, punched my ticket and told me to change at Crewe. Now, God willing, we'll arrive on time at Crewe, they won't ask for my railcard, we will arrive at Holyhead, I will sucessfully get my ticket and board the ferry------where I will most likely fall overboard.

But now there are two school kids with their mum on board and I'm not feeling really well, too much exciting Indian food (it's Diwali and the fireworks are driving EJ crazy). We've stopped in Stafford and I keep noticing that my hair is sticking out at five different angles like an adolescent boys. The English countryside, what I've noticed of it at least, looks exactly like it should, like it does in all sorts of idyllic pastoral paintings and the way it's described in Wordsworth and Hardy. Except for the phone lines, whose wires are run not from the wooden poles but from enormous metal ones, those monstrosities that look like paralyzed robots. They chop up the view pretty badly. Still, I've seen some old churches and little towns, lots of sheep and some horses, and the further I get in this countryside the more I like this place, and the more at home I feel.

The ferry ride was a tremedous disappointment. Used to the quiet and unadorned ferries between Hattaras and Ocracoke, with the barebones passenger lounge and its proletariat coffee machine (dollar donation goes in the lock-box, please)--the Stena line's Irish Sea version of a cruise liner was a bit of a shock. Re-invigorated by the smell of the ocean (I'd dozed a bit through Wales) I strode up the gangplank, thinking to gind some spartan deck with hard plastic shelters. I walked into what sounded like the slots on Wheeling Island--there were tons of arcade games for kids, not to mention actual slot machines; two different bars, a bloody Burger King, a regular restaurant, and at least 5 separate areas with TVs competing against the huge picture windows framing the grey--the grey sea, the grey sky, the grey land. And a wandering balloon artist, with an assistant, for the kiddies. Bew. It made me ill to think I'd been so misled. I'd been looking forward to a 3 hour ride of relative solitude, spending most of it shivering on deck and breathing deep healthy lungfuls of sea air. Instead I almost immediately went and ordered a vodka and soda (the barkeep was generous with the vodka, bless him) and sat down in the passengers lounge under pictures of Bogey and Marlene, reading Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' and sulking.

I now understand why various people tried to deter me from taking this route. They may not have disliked it for the same reasons--I think when the musician in Santa Monica said "There's nothing to see" he probably meant the countryside and the ocean. He's right about the ocean but that's one of my favorite aspects about it, the starkness. And I'd wanted to see it, but I really couldnt' so maybe that's what he meant, that the ferry would keep me from seeing anything. I don't regret the train trip--Wales is beautiful and reminds me of home except for the odd remains of castles and forts here and there, and every sign being written in Welsh--but I'm damned if I ever bother taking that ferry again.




You know, one thing I can say is that, it might take me a while, and the route I might take could be a little different, but at least I always get where I'm going, one way or another. Cheers, kids!