Day 104 - Vacation

 VACATION (HOLIDAY!!)

Prompt - Vacation : Write about a vacation you took.

If I look back over the last near-on six and half decades and think of which holiday I had that still makes me smile more than any other it isn't the one that would seem most obvious.  Not spending a few days in one of the great European cities.  Not lying on a Mediterranean beach.  Not watching the glorious sunrises on a Greek island.  Not the sleeper train across three countries.  No, my favourite remains one which only lasted for three nights away (on one of which I got little sleep), took in three cities, and never left the main island of Great Britain (well, it was always underneath somewhere).  And which let me experience something I'd been thinking about for many years.

We still lived in Southport at the time.  So Day One consisted of making our way to the nearest train station, getting train and bus to Liverpool Airport, and boarding a flight to London City.  Then the DLR into central London.  Hotel for the night, a decent meal and a wander, and an earlyish night.  Day Two gave us a chance to go to a gallery, do some shopping, sit in the sun in the gardens in one of the Bloomsbury squares.  An excellent meal in a Belgian restaurant and off to Kings Cross to catch the sleeper to Inverness.

That was both experience I'd been wanting to try for a long time, and the largely sleepless night. I remember  being awake around three am and conscious that we'd stopped moving.  As it seemed to be a long stop I went to the window of our little cabin and tried to figure out where we were.  An old station clearly, a large and imposing one from what i could tell, and strangely familiar.  Maybe I hadn't quite come fully awake as it took me at least five minutes to realise it was Edinburgh Waverley, a place I should have recognised immediately.

Day three therefore began early.  By six it was clear I wouldn't be getting more sleep, so I dressed and sat in the dining car watching the scenery as the likes of Aviemore and Kingussie flw past in the clear Highlands morning.  We were given a laughably small breakfast (but the tickets were dead cheap so who's complaining?) and pitched out into chillingly cold Inverness station at eight am.  We had booked into the station hotel, and they took in our bags for us, but there were at least five hours to pass before we could get to our room.  So we wandered the streets of an unfeasibly uiet city, looking for somewhere suitable to eat.  There didn't seem to be much around, so maybe it was simple gratitude that made the cooked breakfast in the Lemon Tree Cafe taste like one of the finest repastys of my life.  Or maybe they just did a really good fry up.  Sadly, when I went back a few years later, it had closed down.

Fortified by the scran we did more exploring as the streets started to get a bit busier.  Looked in a few shops, checked out the river and the castle, and made the best discovery of the trip.  Leakey's Bookshop is housed in an old Gaelic church and is one of the biggest second hand book venders in the country.  What a wonderful place to pass a couple of hours, made more so by the cafe on the upper floor where we had lunch (though that too has fallen victim to the passing of time), and leaving with as many books as we thought would fit into our cases...

An evening in Inverness, a comfy room and a good night's sleep, and we entered Day 4, heading homewards.  A mid morning train to Glasgow took us to meet my oldest and best friend, who then took us to lunch in his favourite Italian.  Less than three hours after arriving we were on our way out of central Station heading for... Wigan.  OK, I didn't say the whole trip was perfect, did I?  Changing trains in Wigan means changing stations and standing on the platform of the hideously ugly Wigan Wallgate waiting for our final conveyance, the train to Southport. But so what if the final few hours were a bit of a come down?  By then I felt I'd had several memorable experiences, had finally got to take the sleeper from London to Inverness, discovered a great bookshop, and been able to see my pal I didn't get to see very often.  Sometimes it's the simplest things that prove the most memorable.