We’re off on our main holiday of the year, an Alaskan Cruise followed by a train trip across the Rockies.

Day one didn’t start smoothly, however. “Take the train”, I said, “it will make getting to Heathrow dead easy”. Wrong!

Just as our lift to the station (thank you, Angela!) was driving us out of Codicote I checked the train website and spotted all trains from Stevenage to London were cancelled due to an ‘incident’. Fortunately we were able to reroute to Luton and catch a London train from there. Unfortunately that was not the last of the problems!

Changing to the Elizabeth Line at Farringdon we headed for Heathrow only for the train to unexpectedly terminate at Paddington due to a suspected overhead power problem. Standing on the platform waiting for an update on the problem was a little worrying when we had a flight to catch! Happily it seemed to be resolved fairly quickly and the next train got us to our destination (although slowly) only about an hour later than planned but still in plenty of time to catch the flight.

I’m pleased to say the 9.5 hour flight to Vancouver went smoothly and without incident!