The sauna train arrived into London Euston almost ten minutes early. Several of the train crew had to be picked up off the floor following this startling and unprecedented development.

With a few hours to kill before ‘checking in’ at the place where I’m going to spend the night I decided to get something to eat. London Euston is one of three large terminus stations that are in close proximity to one another, the other two being St Pancreas International and Kings Cross. As you’d expect, this means there are a large number of coffee shops, ‘Upper Crusts’ and ‘Nandos’ in the vicinity. I decided that, of these, Nandos was probably the best bet for an actual meal, so set out to find one.
(Handy travel tip: If you’re ever after a Nandos around one of these three stations, don’t bother with the one in Euston: The seating area for people waiting to be seated is actually larger than the seating area they’re waiting for – no joke. A much better bet is the Nandos hidden away down the east side of Kings Cross.)

London Kings Cross has undergone something of a transformation in recent years. Gone are the drab exterior and overly cramped waiting area, the external facade of the building has been completely restored and, when waiting for your train, you are now presented with this:

It was once said that stations were the ‘new cathedrals’ of their time. Kings Cross is certainly upholding that tradition. You may think that it’s just been keeping pace in the architectural arms race that was kicked off by St Pancras over a decade ago but still, the refurbished station is a very impressive sight (especially at night). Euston, meanwhile, has watched from the sidelines and, with a shrug, done nothing.

Entering Nandos I was faced the timeless problem that anyone who’s every travelled anywhere on their own with a large bag will have experienced: How do I order my meal, keep my table and not get my bag stolen all-at-the-same-time. In Nandos this problem is amplified because you are shown to your table, to which the chicken thingy is added, and then have to go up to order your food from the till.
Luckily my table was ‘out of the way’ so I felt confident enough to leave my large rucksack by the table while going to order. There is, however, another problem:

This is London.
A large bag left unattended makes people…well…nervous.

I figured I had around five minutes from leaving my bag before somebody called the bomb squad. Trouble at the till meant I ran dangerously close to this time limit. When I returned to my table the customers at the surrounding tables had already gone through phases one and two of the ‘it-may-be-a-bomb’ process (looking nervously at each other; edging slightly away from my table) and were just about to start phase three (tweeting about their concerns).
Upon my return a wave of relief rippled through that corner of the restaurant; people settled back into their conversations and meals confident that I was just another customer after all.

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It’s December. It’s cold, dark and generally a bit bleak. Virgin Trains seem to recognise this fact by ensuring that their carriages constantly remind you of the summer months, that is if you holiday in Death Valley, Nevada.

I walked through all five carriages of standard class in this nine-car train to London Euston and this was by far the coolest. In some of the others the passengers were being overcome by the fumes from the plastic fittings starting to blister in the heat. That said, I’m still wishing I’d brought my shorts with me, and perhaps a desk fan.

Virgin Trains: I know that you have heating installed in every carriage – really I understand: it’s a remarkable achievement and something that should be celebrated. But maybe next time the budget to stretch to include a thermostat or two?

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I decided to start this adventure on a Sunday for a reason: it gets the ‘difficult’ day out of the way early on. Sundays are an odd day on the railways; trains will take much longer to get to their destinations and will often take weird and wonderful detours en-route.

Often, your train will in fact be a bus.
Sometimes it won’t even be that.

With that in mind I decided to start this trip with an amble across the Pennines. A short trip from Long Eaton to Sheffield allowed me to catch the trans-pennine express across to Manchester.
With snowfall on most of the peaks, and a sky that threatened more to come, the Pennines fitted the ‘Christmas Card’ billing perfectly. It made me wonder exactly what the highlands of Scotland are going to be like later in the week.
The train seemed to be filled with a mixture of students and travelling Manchester United supporters. As several of them reminded me, later in the afternoon there was the ‘biggest game of the season’ against arch-rivals Liverpool. Confidence seemed to be running high among the supporters on the train although a surprising number of them were planning on placing bets on Liverpool to win the match. I can understand the logic, having considered doing similar in the Ashes or when Murray was playing at Wimbledon – it at least ensures you get something out of the day if your side are horribly beaten.
I arrived in Manchester with two hours or so to wander round the city centre. The sky was heavy with rain although, for the most part, I managed to avoid it.

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At this point it’s probably worth running through the plan for the week. The plan is…well…there is no plan. At least not for the ‘week’. I intend to use the same strategy as I do when travelling round the US: know what you’re doing for the next 1.5 days and, beyond that, have an rough idea of what you’d like to see but nothing booked. This allows you to be flexible and, depending on how you feel at any point in time, you’re free to extend or reduce the scope of what you’re gong to do.

The key thing with this approach is that you always, always have to be aware of your exit strategy. In the US that is a booked flight back to the UK at a specific time in a specific airport. Whatever happens in the interim, you have to make that connection.
For this trip the ‘hard finish’ is midnight on the 20th December and the location is Long Eaton. That’s when the ‘all-line’ rover expires and I don’t want to be in Aberdeen when it does!
So, in line with the above, I know where I’m staying tonight (initially in London, but more on that later), and I know where I’m staying tomorrow (a small hotel in Edinburgh). After that, who knows, although I’ll probably be heading south.

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You’d be right in questioning why I’ve decided to do this, why I’ve decided to do what Portillo did in three years in a week.

I suppose there are a number of reasons, the first of which is the obvious ‘it’s a holiday’; it’s the chance to spend a week doing something that most certainly is not work (and there’s been a bit too much of that this year). The second would be that I’ve never done anything like this before, at least not in this country, and that’s something I’ve wanted to correct for a while.
Those of you who know me well will know that I’ve spent a fair amount of time travelling round North America in the past half-decade. In those years I’ve managed to visit thirty-seven of the fifty states and a fair few of the Canadian provinces. That was the original plan for this week off: travel around another four or five states and get the tally up into the forties. That was still the plan around three weeks ago…but there was something niggling at me.
Wouldn’t it be a bit strange if I managed to visit all of the continental United States while there were still so many places in the UK that I hadn’t seen? Shouldn’t I see my own country first before heading off to explore others?
You may think this is a bit dramatic but, prepare to be shocked. In no particular order, here is a list of places in the UK that I have never visited:

Edinburgh
Aberdeen
Inverness
Glasgow
Cardiff
Liverpool
Newcastle
York
Hull
Sunderland
Swansea
The Scottish Highlands
Pretty much all of South Wales
The North East
The very North of Wales
The East Coast
A fair chunk of the South Devon Coast

Shocking, isn’t it?
I’ll admit that I have been through a few of the cities above before, but I’ve never actually visited them.
How can this be? How can I have got to age thirty having never been to any of those places? One word: London.
Living in the capital for the first eighteen years of my life meant that I didn’t really see much else of the country. When you live in London, and all your relatives and friends do too, why would you go anywhere else? We didn’t do extravagant holidays and, until I was seven or so, the farthest I’d be away from London was Hastings, on the south coast (and trust me, that seemed like a long way!). Our annual holiday to Wales started, which at least let me see some of the midlands from a car window, but since then if you drew a triangle between London, Nottingham and Tywyn, that would encapsulate 80%of the travel I’ve done the UK.
When at university I spent the holidays either in Wales or travelling round France. When I started to earn a wage it was the US.

So now is the time to put some of that right, and see what the UK has to offer. Over the next week I intend to travel the length and breadth of this country and hopefully not get stranded in too many places along the way.

Let’s see what’s out there…

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