Jess and I have never travelled on a train before this trip, so we decided to spend an entire day on one pretty much. This wasn’t in the plans.

Let’s start with the bad news update. This afternoon we somehow boarded the wrong train in Leicester, which delayed us an hour in getting to the airport in Luton, and resulted in us missing our flight to Dublin–despite our flat-out sprint through the airport to the departure gate.  (Our running group would have been so proud!)  In our state of panic, we failed to remember Ryanair’s policy about having your passports checked before heading through security.  Let’s be honest here, we were way too busy running.  I guess we should be thankful London has an entire flock of airports.  (Can we just not talk about how the missed flight fee is approximately four times the cost of the original flight?)  We booted it back on the train– for the third time in one afternoon–and headed to our flight from Gatwick. We’re now sitting in Gatwick, through security, just waiting to board the plane to Dublin.

Enough about that. The good news is we had an amazing time in Leicester with Caitlyn and her roomies.  Leicester is beautiful.  We’re willing to bet it’s Christmas card material in the wintertime.  We spent the night in good company, and were treated to a home-cooked meal 🙂  If it weren’t for the five British accents in the home, we could have said we were in Newfoundland still.  (Also comparable to home? The male population’s general disgust at the mention of Harry Styles. Jess learned this fairly quick).  And since any home-cooked meal needs “something sweet”, Jess and I whipped up some cupcakes for dessert. Like we would.

Lessons learned: Small cities are equally as lovely as the large ones, boarding the proper platform doesn’t always equal boarding the proper train, get to the airport ridiculously early when flying Ryanair, and finally, guys in general do not like Harry Styles.