Travel Missteps: Not the Hogwarts Express

England had some pretty disappointing train trips. I traveled there in the summer of 2002. I remember being a Senior in high school, and dashing through Kings Cross station late at night, to try to catch a glimpse of the barrier between platforms 9 and 10. Why? Because I wanted to act out and take a photo pretending to gain access to Platform 9 3/4!

Imagine my surprise and disappointment to find that platform 9 and 10 are in separate areas! (Now they actually have a photo op elsewhere in the station, but it was dark times for early fans.) So, defeated, we boarded our train to York. I figured the train trip would be enjoyable, and maybe we’d see the countryside like in the movies!

But again I was defeated. On our way to Edinburgh my family managed to score 4 seats facing each other with a table. Seats like those were at a premium so we were lucky. But it was one of the hottest summers on record, and the AC in those cars weren’t working. We sweated, and got dehydrated, so our parents said they’d head to the food cart to get us some water. So we waited…and waited…and waited. As the train made stops people would come and ask if they could have our two “extra” seats. “No” I replied, explaining my parents would be back soon. But they didn’t come back soon. Hours went by. And still we sweated. Finally, I convinced my middle-school aged sister to watch our stuff and the seats by herself as I went to go find our parents. I went through carriage after carriage and didn’t see them. Finally I found them in the well cooled dinning car, enjoying themselves immensely! They decided it was better for them to have AC, than to sit in the hot seats we had found. I was infuriated, having spent hours saving their seats, especially since there was room in the dining car! I still to this day don’t remember anything about the countryside, just the hot, sweaty, stressful mess of saving those seats.