So Long, York…
It was time to return to London for one night, then on to Heathrow Airport the next day for our flight back to Toronto.
When I initially put the agenda together for this trip and booked everything, I looked at the option of flying home from York via Manchester airport. That represented a small issue, though – first we would have had to get to Manchester from York, and even then the flight would have stopped at London Heathrow to connect/change planes anyway. Given all that rigmarole it was simpler to just fly in and out of London, taking a London-York return train.
We got up at 8:00AM to meet our 9:00 breakfast reservation in the hotel’s dining room. We finished our last Queens Hotel breakfast, then headed back to our room at about 9:30.
Checkout time at the Queen’s Hotel was 11:00AM, so we slowly started packing up for our hotel departure and train trip down to London. We had lots of time so we moved slowly and lingered as much as possible; our train to London did not depart from the York train station until 11:50.
Tired of sitting in the hotel room all packed up and ready to go, we decided to check out of the hotel. We left at about 10:30, first returning the room security card, the loaned extension cord and my borrowed cane to the front desk. Outside the hotel I ordered an Uber, which arrived within 5 minutes – very nice and courteous driver (bless Uber – it has been so handy on several European trips).
It was a short ride to the York train station, and we soon arrived. We found the departures platform and waited for our 11:50 train info to appear on the Departure board:
Our platform – Number 3 – was eventually posted on the board, so we made our way there and took a seat on a bench there (the train had not yet arrived).
All Aboard!
The train arrived right on time and we boarded Coach E, the First Class carriage (I had reserved seats months ago when I booked this trip). The train pulled out exactly on time.
It was an hour and fifty-minute trip down to London. The journey passed pleasantly except for a small group of rugby/soccer yobs ahead of us who were clustered around a game on someone’s phone, blasting the game’s commentary at full most of the way down to London and yelling at each other. Brits have an international reputation of getting very worked up over rugby/soccer games, and this was living proof.
All in all, though, the train ride was very good, and we arrived at London’s Kings Cross at about 1:30.
That concludes the York segment of our trip. If you would like to continue on to the rest of the blog and read about our London stopover and journey back to Toronto, click on the “London: Overnight Stopover” link in the lower right of this post.
