A couple of weeks ago now my best friend Sian, my Mum (Angela) and myself travelled to Newcastle for a couple of days, a) because i love Newcastle b) It was my Nana's home town c) I was seeing the amazing Mr Murs at the Metro Arena (That will be another post!) Friday started of as a disastrous day, I always buy my travel upfront from Trainline.com, which means you have to travel on certain trains and can't miss connections! As it happens when we arrived at Rayleigh Station there was no where to park we literally had to park about a mile away. Our train was due at 8:08 and by now it was already five past! We literally grabbed our luggage took a quick picture of the ticket machine (so i could pay for parking on the train) to our dismay we missed the train by like 30 seconds! I was literally freaking out I suffer from anxiety anyway so this did not help matters. If anyone knows me they will know I HATE the Underground so i bought tickets to avoid London, so missing this train was going to make us miss literally EVERY connection, not such good times.
The day got even worse when I realised that when I phoned to pay for my parking I had in fact put the wrong code in so our car wasn't covered at all! As I predicted we literally missed every single connection. When we arrived at Shenfield Station it turnt out the train to Ipswich only ran once a day, so we had to travel to Colchester then from there on to Ipswich. Once we arrived at Ipswich we were informed that the train to Peterborough ran every three hours and we had just missed it, so we were advised to travel to Cambridge. As you can imagine we were all getting fed up and tired by now it felt like we were never going to get there. We had a long wait once we finally got to Cambridge and the station was so packed and to make matters better the train was only going to be three carriages. Luckily, we got on the train and it wasn't as full as i expected! Things were set to get worse, it was 11.45 and out connecting train to Newcastle was due at 12:13 it was going to cost us £300 each on a new ticket if we missed this,so we quick frankly crapping ourselves! The next thing a ticket inspector comes by and we then find out our tickets are not valid for his train, how were we suppose to know? As you might of guessed we totally missed that Peterborough to Newcastle train but thankfully the staff were so lovely and understood our situation and we managed to travel on the next train with no extra cost!
Finally, we were at Newcastle, later then anticipated. After such a disastrous journey we just wanted to get a cab straight to the hotel. We used the black taxis as you exit the station, just a word of advice if you ever find yourselves in Newcastle NEVER EVER USE THESE CABS! OMG they are the rudest and vilest drivers I have ever met in my entire life he was vile! He shouted at us was rude and just literally slung out luggage out his Cab and sped off! We were staying in Jurys Inn which is a really pleasant hotel, but not quite as nice as there sister hotel in Gateshead, the rooms were really small and HOT!
The next morning we just strolled up to Eldon Square and had a look around the shopping centre which was really pleasant and it was a lovely hot day. I love the mixture of High Street and Designer that they have up there. I was even more excited to find a Michael Kors shop!
After a lovely retail therapy session Sian and me decided to start looking for the Metro Arena for that evening. It turnt out it was literally a five minute walk from our hotel which was really handy! I'll be honest it was nothing like what i expected, I don't know whether thats because I had always wanted to go there and imagine this really spectacular place I don't know? But it was horrible it felt old and dirty and smelly but that could have been the bin i was standing next to lol! It could also be compared to The O2 where i go to see all my concerts it felt so different and to me nothing can beat the O2! I just was not impressed! We went round the back gates for little while, which is a major advantage compared to the O2, but there was so many people there it felt pointless to carry on waiting. Plus my nerves for that evening had really started to kick in!
I will tell you all about Olly's show in another post you will not want to miss it! We all had a fabulous weekend and I can not wait to travel back up there soon. I even managed to do the underground without having a panic attack. I know to some travelling on the underground is nothing just a day to day thing but for me that was something major and i proved to myself I can do it! So most defiantly there will be more trips to London now! I hope you enjoyed reading this!
Lots of love
Sophie
xo
