The morning went to Soho and Covent Garden properly this time, slower than the walk through my cousin had given me the night before. Berwick Street's market stalls were already up, one of the last proper street markets left in central London, fruit and fabric and secondhand vinyl within a few feet of each other. Covent Garden's old market building did the same job with more polish: street performers working the piazza under the glass roof, the Apple Market's stalls selling crafts to a crowd that had clearly budgeted for it, the Royal Opera House standing over one corner like it was still slightly surprised by all the noise below it.
I checked out that morning and left my bag in Wombat's lockers for the day, planning to collect it at seven and head straight for Euston. That part of the plan worked exactly as intended.
The train that was not there
What did not work was the train. An email landed on my phone somewhere on the Underground between Whitechapel and Euston Square, the signal cutting in and out just enough that I read the subject line twice before trusting it: my scheduled service to Holyhead, cancelled. I felt the specific panic of someone whose entire night depends on one connection, the kind that makes you get off a train early just to have a proper look at your phone. I did exactly that, found a spot with actual signal, and read past the headline into the fine print, which said to print my ticket as normal and speak to the information desk regardless. Thirty minutes before departure, that is exactly what I did.
The person at the desk did not seem remotely alarmed by any of this, which helped more than anything they actually said. I needed to take the 7:50 to Manchester instead, ten minutes earlier than my original booking, and everything downstream from there would sort itself out. I boarded with the specific relief of a problem that turns out to have already been solved by someone else before I even noticed it.
It sorted itself out in stages. At the first stop we were told to get off and board a different train entirely. At the next, told to move to the rear five coaches to reach the portion continuing on toward the port. At the station after that, told again, move forward five coaches this time, a different half of the train peeling off toward a different destination. I learned to watch for the conductor walking the platform with the same instruction on repeat, which turned out to be faster than waiting for the tannoy to catch up every time. I spent a good ten minutes convinced this was simply how the journey worked now, coach changes at every stop until Wales ran out. It was not. It stopped, eventually, and I stayed on the same set of wheels the rest of the way to Holyhead.
We reached Holyhead around midnight. The ferry, a SailRail ticket bundling the train and the crossing into one booking, left at half past one and was due into Dublin Port by five. The math on this ticket had made the decision for me weeks earlier: cheaper than flying for these dates once you added Stansted or Gatwick and a night's accommodation into the flight price, and it used what would otherwise have been dead time, a full night, for both travel and sleep at once.
