February 2nd at 7:00 a.m. I woke up and got dressed, which would seem like a normal day if it wasn't a Saturday morning. But it wasn't just any plane old Saturday, it was the day I was going to Oxford.
I met up with my friend Lindsey and together we embarked through the cold to the tube station to the train station where we boarded a train to Oxford. It was supposed to be a relatively simple train ride, an hour there an hour back, that is until our train broke on the way there.
There was no major problem and everyone was fine, but one of the doors wouldn't close all the way making the train unsafe to travel, which caused us to switch to a different train and arrive about two hours later than we planned.
Once in Oxford we just wandered around. We had no real plans for the day, just a few places we wanted to go see, like the Oxford campus. It was a really good trip. It felt really freeing not to have a schedule and just to have the ability to wander around the town. By the end of the day we walked just about the whole length of the town, so we felt pretty fulfilled with what we saw.
The Oxford campus was beautiful, and don't worry there will be a slideshow of pictures at the bottom of this post for your viewing pleasure. It felt more open than Cambridge did, we wandered onto it without even realizing it at first. They have waterfront property so we got to see their rowing teams practicing, which was really cool. It was something I never saw before and didn't think I would be able to see in February.
The town of Oxford is also very cute. We ate in this little cafe, which had really good food. I had a salmon crepe while Lindsey had a salad, and to top it off we both got hot chocolate!
It was a very good meal and i'm so glad we wandered into the cafe, it was worth it!
After a while we were started to feel frozen so we went into the shopping plaza and did some window shopping before deciding to catch a train back home. This is where everything started to take a turn for the worse.
Lindsey and I were under the impression that if it wasn't during peak hours you could get on any train. Well, it turns out this wasn't the case, and we didn't find out until we were literally five minuets from the London station.
They were doing random ticket checks and it turns out two young Americans are the perfect people to do a random ticket check on. So we showed him our tickets and he said we were on the wrong train, and we explained that we were told that we could get on any train heading back to London as long as it wasn't peak hours. Another detail about this that I should mention is that we got on a train that was half an hour before our actual train was supposed to depart. If we would've known, we would've waited it out. We truly thought it was okay for us to do. At the end of the day the ticket guy said we should be more careful, charged us for a whole new ticket (33 pounds) and called it even. It was just a very embarrassing way to end our otherwise perfect day.
So the moral of the story is, make sure you get on the right train or they're going to charge you a ridiculous amount of money. In the meantime, If you don't plan on getting on a train to Oxford anytime soon, here's some pictures for your viewing pleasure.
As always,
Talia