This morning we got up fairly early and made our way to the reception of the hotel to check out and have some breckie in the dining room there. We all had a yummy hot breakfast to kick start our day which was just what we all felt like. We had a little drive around Nailsworth before making our way to Malmesbury where we came across a very upsetting situation for this wee township. The rain has been so heavy over the last few days that we saw extreme flooding which was devastating and we hadn't realised that they were going through this until we got here. We all weren't very up to play with the current news so this was a real eye opener and although it is a gorgeous little place the severe flooding will be something we will always remember seeing. Other parts of the country are also affected by this rain which has caused road closures and hundreds of houses have been affected. This has meant that people have had to move out of their homes temporarily or are living in heart wrenching situations.

From here we decided to keep driving on to Chettenham where we stopped and wandered around for a little bit before heading on to Gloucester, by which time we were ready for a late lunch. We found a neat little classic pub near The Docks which was easy, reasonable and enjoyable. After we finished our lunch John and Mum drove us to the Gloucester Train Station where we had planned to try and catch a direct train back to London leaving at 4:20pm. We ended up being in a little bit of a rush but it turned out there were severe delays due to all the flooding etc. We hopped on a train straight away but it had infact been delayed by one hour from the start of the line in Cardiff so it was very packed with people and there were reserved tickets on pretty much all the seats. Andrew and I were hopping between seats that came available so we were not sitting together unfortunately and it was a very slow journey.

The train was apparently running on one engine so this is why it was so slow! We then had a message that there was a dangerous slip reported so we were waiting for updates, then a tree had to be moved from the tracks so we had to wait for this to be removed, and then we ended up stuck on an incline waiting to be rescued because we couldn't move forward. Crazy! Waiting waiting waiting... It was actually quite scary because we had no idea what the outcome would be. Everyone seemed to stay pretty calm but there was quite a lot of frustration as you can imagine. There were heaps of Kiwi's on the train because of the All Black vs Wales game that was in Cardiff on the Saturday night so there were familiar accents all around us which was quite nice in a way.

So after a couple of hours waiting on this incline it was announced that we were going to get connected up with the train behind us who would push us up the hill so of course this took quite some time to be sorted! We were not even at the next station yet so hadn't gone very far at all! We managed to get to the next station (Kemble) with the aid of the other train. It is a very small station where we all got told to evacuate the train because it was officially un-safe to proceed. Hundreds of people were outside waiting in the cold and rain and nobody knew what was happening or how we were going to get home. We heard through some passengers that a new driver was being sent to Kemble because the previous driver had done a massively long shift and this was a safety issue also. They must have done some work on the train while we were all waiting because we were eventually all instructed to board the train again and it seemed to be running better than before. Oh what a Nightmare! It was now 10.40pm so it was going to be a late night and Andrew and I were a tad worried how we would get from London Paddington to Hammersmith at the hour we would be arriving.

We ended up arriving at London Paddington at 12.20am then we made our way to a bus stop to get us home. No tubes were running so we had to find a bus which Andrew had sorted so we ended up getting home at about 1am! What a trip! Am sure this made the headlines!