Swansea, Wales to Southampton, England

Monday, June 2, 2014

After breakfast at the hotel, we packed up and took a taxi to the train station. We got there early enough to buy a couple of soda bottles and chips for the train ride. Our train was in the station but not ready to board yet. We went to scout out the seat situation and it seemed that nearly every seat was reserved. But once we asked, we were told that the last car does not have any reserved seats and we found four seats facing each other so that we could sit together.

The train ride from Swansea to Cardiff took about 55 minutes. When we got there, we only had 5 minutes to get on the next train. Luckily there was a railroad employee on the platform to help travelers. She helped us find the car that had no reserved seats (we had the same situation on this train with only two reserved seats). We put the kids in the train and loaded the luggage as fast as we could, as soon as Steve stepped into the train (he was loading the luggage from the platform and I was at the top of the stairs with the kids), the train started moving. We were happy that we managed to get us and our luggage all on the train on time.

The ride from Cardiff to Southampton took about 2 hours and 20 minutes and we were glad that this is our last train ride before we board the ship. We are all done travelling and ready to head home. We found a cab outside of the train station and had him take us to the car rental place.

We basically had no choice but to rent a car as the hotel I booked was in a rest area on the motorway (or what we would call an interstate). The car we got was a Hyundai – some type of a small SUV. We did not want to pay 14 pounds (25-28 dollars) a day for a GPS and asked for a map. Of course, they did not have any but directed us to a gas station about 2 miles from the office to buy a map.

Steve drove – his job was to drive on the correct side of the road while using a manual gear shift (it is not only on the other side than what we are used to, but the speeds are in different positions and reverse is in the front). We bought the map and I asked the clerk to mark on the map where we were. I located our hotel but the trick was that we would be coming on the opposite side of the motorway and had no way to get to it.

Studying the map closely, I found a little road that looked like a back road to the rest area (I thought maybe this was for the hotel guests so that they could get in and out without getting on the motorway). When we got there, the little road was marked “service vehicles only”. We decided to go ahead and go. One illegal drive through a gate and hooray! We were at the rest area. However, we could not see the hotel at all. We pulled into the gas station and the attendant said that the hotel was back there behind the trees. He also pointed out a small road that connected the parking lot we were in with the main parking lot. We pulled in through the tiny narrow road only to realize that we were /in the rest area parking lot that was not connected to the hotel parking lot.

We were tired of travelling, unpacked and walked over the grass and down the sidewalk to get to the hotel. We asked at the reception how to get in there parking lot. The hotel is situated between junctions (exits) 3 and 4.  We were told that we needed to go to junction 2, get off, get on the motorway to go the other direction all the way to junction 5, get off, turn around and get back on the direction we originally started on and get off at the rest area exit.

We rested for a moment and then loaded back to up move the car to the hotel parking lot. We had to move the car in less than 2 hours as after that one was required to pay for the parking via a cell phone which we did not have. Steve wanted to drive 50 feet against traffic and be done with it. I was against this thinking it was unsafe. It turned out that driving miles on the motorway, navigating roundabouts at two different exists and spending 30 minutes in traffic put us at higher odds for getting into a crash than driving 50 feet against traffic. But what was done was done and in the end we were safely back in the hotel about 50 feet from where we started earlier. 

We ate dinner at the McDonald’s in the rest area and stayed put for the night. The hotel had no air conditioning. It was doable with an open window in this weather but we were happy we were not staying here during the summer. At least the internet access was free and had decent speed.