The First Steps

Every journey starts with the first step; so some very wise person once said - probably! After we spent a few days saying our goodbyes to family and friends in Morecambe, we finally took ours - to Warminster.

Thursday 25th Feb was our first step, onto a Virgin train en-route to Birmingham New Street and a very smooth journey it was too: until we got there.

The mysteries of the train company franchises and re-routing has thrown up a massive headache for those of us wanting to travel from the north west to the south west. We now have to get off a perfectly serviceable train which could easily have made it to the West Country and wait for another one which has come from Newcastle.

Changing at Birmingham before was bad enough but with the refurb it's even worse. It didn't help the fact the memsahib needed the loo, however when she emerged onto the shiny new concourse with about seven minutes to spare before our connection to Bristol we started to panic.

I could see where we needed to be but we were in the wrong zone! Negotiating the automatic ticket barriers with two backpacks a suitcase and a wife isn't easy at all. Even worse; in order to get to platform 9B we had to once again fight with another set of barriers. On the other side the monitor at platform 9 read Newcastle - where was 9B?

Thankfully Virgin and Network Rail have realised that navigating their shiny new station is like trying to do the puzzle on the Krypton Factor, badly, and have positioned many advisors around the choke points. We did, thankfully, make our Cross Country train and the journey to Bristol was uneventful.

You change at Temple Meads ( A cold fridge of a station) for Warminster. We headed for the pasty franchise in the underpass to warm us both up, waiting for the Portsmouth Harbour train. Don't think we'll see a pasty for a while whilst in Asia?

On arrival in Bath the train filled with lots of very posh kids, probably with very rich parents who could afford to send them to very expensive schools. (And afford the season ticket for the train). Not a swear word uttered though - they were all too busy on their iPhones.

At last we pulled into Warminster, the place I attended army courses, fell in love, got married and eventually lived for over ten years. A chance to say farewell to Lynn's family and not too far from Heathrow - phase 1 completed!

The last supper at Quite Simply French in Lancaster

Daylight robbery!!

On our way.