How Luck, Quick Thinking, Paganism, and the Kindness of Many Strangers Saw Me To The End Of My Vision Quest

I did promise you a juicy post.

So Tintagel is a principal setting in the novel I wrote my freshman year of high school. Both at that time and during five years of subsequent revisions, I did extensive research on both the history and present appearance of the site. But there are some things you can’t get from a photo on Wikipedia. In truth, the desire to see Tintagel for real (especially as I had the strange feeling that standing in the ruins would make all the pieces of my fragmented draft fall together once and for all) is part of what prompted me to study abroad in the United Kingdom. Mom calls Tintagel my vision quest.

But getting there is easier said than done.

A swift recap: The plan was to take a National Express bus from Cardiff to Bristol and then another from Bristol to Wadebridge, the largest town in Cornwall. I overcame the problem of the sixteen-mile, bus-less home stretch by literally begging a ride off the assistant of the manager of The Cornishman, the bed and breakfast in Tintagel, who agreed to pick me up in Wadebridge.

Which would have gone beautifully, except I missed the Cardiff to Bristol bus.

I’m not even sure I want to tell this story in full. Anyone can misread a bus ticket. I’m mildly embarrassed, but I’m sure it’s happened to perfectly intelligent people in the past. No, to tell this story in full is to plumb the depths of my own serial incompetence. This is a tragicomedy of errors. This will probably be amusing in retrospect, but it’s going to take a lot of retrospect.

Last night, I printed off the tickets. Never mind that they mysteriously printed on an enormous sheet of poster paper and each letter was as high as my thumb; a bar code scanner could probably still read them if I held them far enough away. I checked the departure time. My first bus was set to leave at 11:25. I tucked the (very, very, folded) tickets in my satchel.

This morning, I woke up half an hour before my alarm was set to go off. I took another swift glance at the departure time—yep, 11:25, my piece of enormous paper hadn’t magically changed its message overnight—and finished packing, went downstairs, completed my daily game of is-this-the-tea-pot-or-the-coffee-pot-because-they’re-identical-except-Aberdare-coffee-is-vile, filled my thermos with tea for later, ate a quick breakfast with Anna and company (over a strange recap of A Fish Called Wanda), waved goodbye to everybody, and strolled to the Sophia Gardens stop where I was set to catch my bus.

I arrived, sat on a bench at the stop, opened my ticket to triple-check the time…and had a heart attack, because the ticket said 10:15.

The 11:25 I’d read—twice—was the arrival time in Bristol. I make no excuses. I am an idiot.

Ensued five minutes of frantically dashing between the three buses parked at the stop, praying that I was hallucinating and one of them was really mine (I believe this is called denial). Finally I thought to run to the ticket office, which is a little cottage at the edge of Sophia Gardens. I begged the ticket lady to put me on the 12:30 to Bristol.

There was room on the 12:30. The catch is that it wouldn’t get me into Bristol until 1:30, and the Bristol to Wadebridge bus—the only Bristol to Wadebridge bus—was set to leave at 1:25. Remember this number. It will become relevant (or irrelevant) later. Her advice was instead to run to the train station, get the 11:30 train to Bristol, and then take a city bus across town to the bus depot, where I could possibly still make the Wadebridge bus. Note that suspending the journey till tomorrow was not an option, because tomorrow is the only day Tintagel Castle is open during my stay.

Now, I’ve been putting off taking day trips by train for precisely one reason: I’ve never been able to find the train station.

Frantically, I asked her for directions. She told me to use the castle as a landmark; walking straight away from the front gates, follow High Street and then turn right for the station.

I sprinted. Sprinting is difficult to do through a muddy, grassy river park while simultaneously panicking and trying to stuff your escaping wardrobe back into your school satchel. I made a major tactical error and trusted neither my gut nor the ticket woman’s directions, which were to cross the bridge over the river and basically circle around to the front of the castle from the right. I’d never been around that way before, and didn’t want to start experimenting now. To play it safe, I cut back through the park—I definitely underestimated how far that was going to be—and approached the castle from the more familiar left, where I found High Street. (As it turns out, I could see the corner of Sophia Gardens from the castle gates. Note to self: Trust the locals. When someone with a Welsh accent tells you to go counterclockwise around the castle, you go counterclockwise around the castle.)

I did the 1,609-meter dash down High Street. (My P.E. all-time record for the mile run was 14 minutes. I did this one in twelve, in boots, with a satchel, not knowing where I was going. It’s amazing what adrenaline will do for you.)

I Googlemapped the right turn and was duped into a pointless loop around the stadium. I watched the minutes tick down on my phone. At T-minus ten minutes before the train was due to leave, I waylaid a fellow pedestrian and begged for directions. Perhaps the fact that he had an American accent, too, should’ve worried me, but he gave me a shortcut and I followed it. Luckily for me, his information was good. I arrived at the train station. I blundered around for a while until a security guard asked me if I was okay (I seem to get that a lot here) and directed me to the ticket office.

I arrived at the window sweaty, hyperventilating, flustered, with thermos, hat, gloves, and ticket tucked under my arm, phone in hand, satchel starting to explode, scarf unwinding from neck, limping because the lining in my boot had folded up again and I was getting a blister. I probably looked like I was on the run from the Welsh mob. The woman ahead of me in line took one look at me and told me to go ahead of her.

The ticket lady got me the Bristol ticket for thirteen pounds fifty. I inserted my Fidelity card.

The machine rejected it.

I’d known that this would happen if I tried to use one of the automatic ticket machines, which is why I’d beelined for the real-person window. Usually, when you’re dealing with a real person, they’ll ask for a signature and you’re good to go. But she took one look at her screen, told me my card had been “rejected,” and called for the next person in line.

Dad has told me that I should carry fifty pounds cash on me at all times for emergencies. I’ve never carried more than ten because, by the fundamental laws of incompetence, if I carried more I would lose my wallet.

I dashed outside, found an ATM, withdrew thirty pounds, and ran back inside. The line had gotten longer. I tap-danced anxiously in place until my turn came again. The lady gave me an extremely fishy look, but she took the cash and gave me my ticket. I dashed through the station and up the stairs to Platform 2—

—where I found a crowd of equally-baffled Bristol-bound Brits staring at an empty track.

So first the train got delayed. Then the platform got moved. Finally I managed to get onto the right train. It pulled out of the station 20 minutes late. The trip to Bristol ordinarily takes an hour. This meant I was due into Bristol at about 12:50. The A1 city bus from the train station to bus depot runs every 10 minutes and takes about 17 minutes, so assuming I was really unlucky and had to wait that full 10 minutes—and also factoring in five minutes of headless-chickening to find the bus stop—I figured it’d be about 30 minutes from the door of my train to the door of the Wadebridge bus.

In the moments of relative calm that followed as the train glided through miles of bucolic Welsh countryside, I began to relax. I took off my coat. I tucked my thermos and gloves back into my bag. I remembered how to breathe. I began to congratulate myself on quick thinking, decisive calls, and fearlessness in asking strangers for directions. I figured that was the spin I would put on the story when I texted Mom and Dad to admit what happened. I know I cocked up, but by keeping my wits and persevering even when I thought I should definitely quit before I ended up stranded in an unfamiliar city with no return ticket…I fixed it!

Then, just to torture myself, I opened my crumpled, tattered bus ticket to look at what a close call it was going to be. I had another heart attack. The Wadebridge ticket actually said the departure time was 1:15.

I redid the math (math being one of those things I do as a form of self-punishment), and found that instead of eight minutes to spare, I was going to have negative two.

This was the point at which I texted Dad my entire story with little punctuation and much abject apologizing. It was about 11:50 my time, which made it four in the morning his time. I was under no illusions that he would get the message in enough time to advise me; I was merely stress-texting. (I would’ve been stress-eating if I hadn’t forgotten to put my prosciutto sandwich in the refrigerator last night and realized this morning that I would have to throw it out or risk food poisoning, and then forgot to do that too. It’s waiting on the floor of my bedroom for when I get back on Wednesday.)

In a flash of brilliance, I realized that I could call an Uber the minute I stepped onto the train platform, so a car would be waiting for me outside the train station as soon as I got outside. Over such a short distance, an Uber wouldn’t cost that much more than the A1, and could shave a critical five minutes off my journey. This plan lasted as long as it took me to realize that my Uber app never re-downloaded after I had to replace my drowned phone last month. So, bus it would have to be.

And speaking of phone, my phone chose this half-hour lull in my morning to overheat and spontaneously drain two-thirds of its battery. Also, Dad texted me back. He was on call, so his phone had been on, and my text had woken him up. I was not emotionally prepared for anyone else to know the depth of my incompetence just yet, but the fact that he didn’t chew me out (much) did help soothe my frazzled nerves. Also, he apparently chose today to learn how to use emoji. Over the course of the resulting conversation, I got a bus emoji, a thinking face emoji, a trumpet, a Greek tragedy mask, and a turkey (as in “you are a turkey”).

At this point, I started praying to the Welsh god Arawn, promising to sacrifice my thermos of Aberdare tea on his altar if he delayed the Wadebridge bus just two minutes.

The train had neither a screen with the stop names nor any announcement. I nearly missed the Bristol Temple Mead train stop. I was saved only by the emo girl next to me who saw my ticket on my lap and told me to run before the doors closed. The way my day was going, I was sure I’d find myself stranded on a train platform in a nameless Welsh town with no more buses to Bristol or Cardiff till Monday, but I had to make another one of those split-second decisions. I was relieved when I found a (very small) sign on the platform that said Bristol Temple Mead.

So I ran down the stairs, got lost in the station, waylaid about three different security guards for directions to the exit, found the exit, and got trapped because you have to feed your used ticket into the automated shredding machine to open the gates (presumably so you can’t re-use a ticket), except I hadn’t known I would need my ticket again and so I hadn’t kept track of it. Thank Arawn, what I had done in my nervous fidgeting was absently wrap it in the fiver that I was going to use to pay for the bus. I only figured this out because I dug the fiver out of my wallet to save time when I (presumably) got free. I used the ticket to open the gate, got outside, and asked four different people for directions to the A1 stop.

I finally found the stop, boarded the bus (the fare was actually only two pounds, which is cheaper than Cardiff), and had the foresight to ask the bus driver which stop to get off at for the Marlborough Road Bus Depot, since, like the trains, the buses give no indication of the stops. He said the A1 didn’t actually go to the Marlborough Road Bus Depot anymore, despite what Google had told me. He sent me to the 73 bus…which, from twenty feet away, I watched pull out of its stop.  At this point my phone, with its dying breath, told me that the 70 bus also went to the bus depot. I found the 70 bus, and yes, it would go near the bus depot, as long as I didn’t mind waiting another fifteen minutes for the route to begin.

This was the point at which I checked the time and realized that Arawn had interceded on my behalf and I hadn’t even noticed—despite the delayed start, the Bristol train had made up for its lost time and gotten into the station only five minutes late. Now—I did the math a third time—traffic willing, I had three minutes to spare.

I went and sat in the silent, empty 70 bus until finally—finally!—the door closed and the engine started up. The driver had told me how many stops were between me and the bus depot, so I counted them as the bus crept through downtown Bristol. (Bristol would probably be quite a beautiful city, under other circumstances. It has early 19^th-century terraces built along the front of an old, old quay. There’s a Georgian mansion perched on a cliff. There are wheeling gulls and old sailor taverns. Even the concrete pilings under the overpass are painted with brightly-colored murals.)

I nearly missed this bus stop, too, because the driver had told me the stop was called Beefeaters and the sign over the bus shelter actually said Marlborough South. I only realized where we were because there was a pub with a picture of a beefeater on the sign. I alighted from the bus and asked many more random strangers to point me in the direction of the bus depot (my phone being dead as a doornail at this point). I found the depot. I raced inside. It was much larger than I expected. There was a bit of dashing about trying to find the Wadebridge bus. I spotted it through the window. I ran to the automatic door—

—which wouldn’t open for me.

Imagine me standing there waving my arms at the sensor, five feet from the Wadebridge bus, as it pulls out of the station.

It didn’t actually pull out. But it was a very near thing. I had to run to a different door to get outside. I ran back to my bus. (I watched the automatic door open just fine for somebody else. I think Arawn might have been having a little joke.)

And that is the long tale of how, with luck, quick thinking, Paganism, and the kindness of many strangers, I got on the bus to Wadebridge with about a minute and a half to spare.

This triumph would have felt much more fulfilling if it hadn’t been my gross incompetence that necessitated all of that in the first place.

My mistake cost me fifteen pounds and my dignity. I came out of it with a massive, painful blister on my heel from the peeling-up lining in my left boot, which will make walking Tintagel interesting tomorrow. I have learned to double, triple, quadruple, quintuple-check the times on my bus tickets, and also to carry more cash, and also to hurry up and get the wire transfer instructions from Santander so Dad can put money on my British chip-and-pin card, and also that I am an idiot, a turkey, and a really pathetic traveler, as well as one lucky shmuck.

In any case, giddy with triumph, I waded to the very back of the bus, sank down in one of the cushy seats, set my bag by my feet, and opened my thermos for a triumphant sip of tea, which turned out to be disgusting lukewarm Aberdare coffee because I got the pots mixed up again.