Day 5 – I think… I’ve gone into holiday mode where I’m never exactly sure of the time or day of the week, let alone how long ago we left NZ.
When deciding how we were going to travel we opted to each take a backpack. The method to this madness was that it would be easier to fit the four of us into a taxi if we each had a soft bag. If we all had suitcases, or even probably if just one of us had a rigid suitcase, it might not work. It was also a chance for the older Scotts to relive the glory of their backpacking days.
This morning we decided was the time we were going to do some actual backpacking by walking to and using public transport to get from our hotel to Gare du Nord to catch the Eurostar to London. By 7am we each had our trusty backpacks on and gathered in the hallway outside our shoebox rooms. While I’ve been disparaging about the size of the hotel, the rooms worked well for our needs. Each room had a double bed with a single bunk over it. A toilet and a shower cubicle were the only separate spaces in the room which had a sink next to the bed, and a small desk with a TV over it (which we couldn’t get to work).
As should be the case with travel luggage, each of our chosen totes had a back story of their own. Murrays, in a charming shade of karitane yellow (an informal name for a (baby-excrement-coloured) unpleasant shade of yellow) hails from the 1980s. It’s seen more of the globe than a lot of people having been Murray’s trusty side-kick from the USA, to Europe, to Russia and more. My Macpac in a faded lilac hue was purchased in 1989 by my good friend Luanne at the same time I purchased a replica in green. The green and purple backpacks travelled together from London for 3 months through Europe in a 1969 VW Combi van called Barry during the summer of 1990. In each country, we purchased a patch which we meticulously sewed onto the detachable day pack. While I loaned my backpack out for it to never be seen again, Luanne kindly offered me her lilac sack when we were travelling on our big family trip in 2011/12. Along with Murray’s karitane yellow bag they went through Southeast Asia, the U.K. and Europe to Iceland, the USA, Canada and Fiji over 8 months carrying clothing for the four of us.
This time the kids’ clothes a bigger, as are they, so they each have their own backpacks which are beginning to accumulate their own travel history. Kennedy has a new model Macpac, which we gave her for Christmas. Purchased 33 years after her mother’s one it has the same great function and was strangely way cheaper than the $400 I spent all those years ago. It has already seen her safely on her first solo trip that she planned and organised with a group of friends earlier this year. Christmas was a time of gifting bags to our children, Christian also got a bag, a cricket gear backpack which he has repurposed for travel.
Backpacks in place we manoeuvered ourselves into the hotel lift like the Rush Hour car game, exited the hotel and were on our way. We were 200 metres down the road when I remembered that backpacking is actually shit, and it’s quite hard work when you clocked up over 22km walking the day before. Add to that having to squeeze yourself through narrow Paris subway gates hell-bent on sabotage and trying not to piss off local commuters as you take up large amounts of space on the underground and I was vowing to never do it again as we trudged for miles through Gare du Nord from the underground station to the Eurostar check-in 90 minutes before our train was due to depart.
We were lined up and funneled through the system with efficiency and with about 45 minutes to spare we had safely exited France and entered the U.K. with still not a single person asking us how long we planned to stay.
I love a good train ride so eased back in my seat as the train eased out of the station and then picked up pace as we watched the scenery whiz by at 220km per hour. To distract ourselves from any submarine chat as we plunged into the darkness of the Chunnel the kids and I played a few rounds of cards (Scum) and before long the train was pulling to a stop at Paddington Station. You’d think that now being in an English-speaking country this would be the easy part of our holiday but today proved to be a day of muck ups (I’d usually use a word starting with ‘F’, but am keeping it clean). I visited the information booth at Paddington Station thinking I was going to buy four Oyster Cards to use for our London travel however I was informed that this wasn’t possible as far out as Slough where our hotel was located. Without giving enough thought to our plans for the rest of the day we decided to buy one-way tickets from Paddington to Slough which cost about £14 each.
We shoved ourselves and our backpacks through London turnstiles and boarded an express service to Slough. You may be wondering why we chose to stay in Slough as it’s not necessarily known as a tourist hotspot, maybe, we’re about to change that. Slough has a long history dating back as far as 1086 when William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book listed some of the landowners in ‘Upton’ in this area. The first recorded mention of Slough itself was in 1196 when it was spelt ‘Slo’. It is now one of the most ethnically diverse towns in the UK where over 150 languages are spoken and it has the highest concentration of UK HQs of global companies outside London. Perhaps most famously it was the home of the brilliant comedy creation of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, The Office UK, set in a large paper company called Wernham Hogg, where ‘life is stationery’.
This fascinating backstory had nothing to do with why we chose to stay here. The cost of booking one hotel room for the four of us to cram into anywhere near central London was enough to buy a small country. We spent hours and hours pouring over AirBnB and managed to find a handful that worked but they all cancelled on us. As the time of our trip drew near we opted to book two spacious rooms in a Holiday Inn hotel out of London and balance out spending a bit more time and money on transport with hopefully enjoying being a little more rural and having a different London experience.
Part of our London plan also was that Christian was going to play a game of cricket for a club in Ickenham which is not too far from Slough. Alas, Christian broke his hand 4 days before we left so the cricket game was out the window anyway but by this stage, we were locked in.
We had some entertainment on the train ride from Paddington to Slough. Sitting in front of us was a man, perhaps in his late 20’s/early 30’s. A woman of a similar age, accompanied by an older man asked him if the seats opposite him were free, and when he indicated yes, they sat down. Their conversation (between the young man and woman, the old man never said a word) started off slow, and a bit boring. Murray commented after a few minutes that the guy was a dick and expressed his wish that he’d shut up, but the more we tuned in, the better it got. After he stopped chirping on about himself, how much rugby he’d played, his time in the military and how far he’d had to travel for a meeting that day, the young woman got a chance to speak. Turns out she was travelling with her Dad for his 70th birthday, she got picked for the trip ahead of her three brothers (favourite child) and is some kind of Argentinian pop star. She had been the opening act for Niall Horan and was a judge on an Argentinian TV talent show. She showed him her Instagram video of the Niall Horan concert, he followed her, she followed him back and we may have been witness to the start of a beautiful romance.
As we pulled into Slough station I excitedly pointed out the Holiday Inn Express, easily identifiable with the huge sign high on its side, right next to the station, ‘See how close you are to the station kids?’ They rolled their eyes as I extolled the virtues of the location and the large supermarket and town centre nearby. Weary from our early start and carrying our life on our backs we trudged toward the entry of the hotel looking forward to a rest and refresh.
On the way, I found a group of people I detest more than those who stop in entranceways to take photos or look for lost items in handbags. A lot of people have small suitcases on wheels, traditionally these have two wheels and are dragged behind, or pushed in front of their owners. The scourge on society is people with small suitcases with four wheels. These subhumans don’t pull them behind OR push in front, no they hold them out to their side, as far as their arm will reach and push them along beside them, tripling, if not quadrupling the amount of space they take up in public space. Get a backpack for fucks sake.
We were ‘greeted’ at the hotel door by a burly security guard asking us what we wanted.
Unusual I thought but I responded cheerily, ‘We have a reservation.’
‘Not here you don’t,’ he replied. ‘This hotel has been closed for years’.
Gillian Scott Creative 