Day 2 Friday, May 12th 2023, Plymouth to Heathrow

First, the pictures of beautiful Lower Town which I promised yesterday.   

Rowley Rock - just about

Round Island and blue sky/sea

And so on Thursday, I posted as we were on our way to Plymouth by train.  We arrived OK in Plymouth  and after waiting for a taxi we made our way to the Premier Inn and retired almost immediately.  Yesterday, Friday we had made our plans to travel from Plymouth to Heathrow by train (the bookings were made on Wednesday evening).  We taxied to Plymouth station and found our booked train had been cancelled at midnight. We were in a quandary as there were no other London direction trains available for the day.  We thought about coach travel but did not fancy it, we spoke to other travellers and GWR personnel and found that if we could get to Exeter there was a train going to London Waterloo via Basingstoke (we do see the world!).  Four of us decided to hire a taxi (£100) to get to Exeter and off we set.  One of the other two was an American who was also going to Heathrow.   I will complete this once we are in Iceland but you can see that on the 13th we managed to get to Heathrow. 

Exeter St Davids station

 From Exeter we took our train to  Waterloo via Basingstoke which went reasonably well apart from the train breaking down and we all had to transfer to an already busy one.  Once we arrived at Waterloo us and our new found American friend decided to get to Heathrow via the underground and the Elizabeth line. It took longer than we had planned on the Heathrow Express but at least it was running. Once we got to Heathrow we said goodbye to our genial American friend and got the Hoppa bus to our Premier Inn.  We were both  shattered by this time (the last three days were catching upon us) and so we ate our prebooked meal and retired early.  I am posting this from on-board in Iceland and so the next day's travelling was more successful.  I hope to catch up with two days blogging tomorrow.