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| 458 miles |
The day of departure arrived and I diligently walked into Cardiff at 7 in the morning, an hour early with the intention of starting my journey as I meant to go on. Getting to London was a doddle. It was snowing but only in a cake-dusting sort of way. I went straight to St Pancras and checked out the check-in. Nobody there and over two hours for me to board anything so I went for brekkie. An hour later I came back to find a queue as long as the station; all mainland Europe trains cancelled due to snow. At least they gave us plenty of warning. I later discovered that I received an email informing me of the cancellation, which was sent to me forty minutes after I was due to depart. No arguing about efficiency there, eh?
Long story short, I caught the next train, which was also half an hour late arriving, which meant that I missed my connection from Brussels to Cologne. I eventually managed to get on to the next train which was half an hour late turning up. By the skin of my arteries, I caught the most important train, Cologne to Moscow, with less than twenty minutes to spare. Luckily I had planned to stop off on the way which meant that all of my windows of spare time were eaten up with the delays and I still managed the end goal - getting on the Russian bound train. Not the most auspicious start to my meandering train adventure.
I left at 7 am and I stepped onto the last train of the day at 22:30. I was cold, tired, hungry and hadn't had a wee since London. Nonetheless I climbed into my top bunk and fell straight into a blissful sleep.
