Wheels Up: Amtrak to Heathrow, and the Long Train Ride to Cornwall

Last updated: August 7, 2026

It’s official. The spreadsheet has left the building.

I left Delaware on August 2nd. By the time I got to Cornwall, I’d been on an Amtrak train, a plane, and most of the British rail network, and I’d lost track of what day it was somewhere over the Atlantic. That’s the first thing nobody tells you about a departure like this: it isn’t one clean moment. It’s a series of legs, and the tiredness stacks.

---

The night before

The day before I left, my friends threw me a party. Though “party” probably oversells it. It was a low-key get-together, which is exactly what I would have asked for if anyone had asked.

My closest friends here in Delaware, plus a couple who flew in from out of state to be there. The people who know me best, in one room, the night before I left for fifteen months.

I’d braced for it to be heavy. It wasn’t. There were no speeches, no big emotional production, nobody treating it like a farewell. We just hung out the way we always do. Considering what the next few days were going to look like, that turned out to be exactly the right call, and honestly it was one of my favorite nights in a long time.

---

An Amtrak, a car handoff, and one last dinner

The trip out of Delaware started on the ground, not in the air. My friends drove me to the train station in my own car, and that’s not a typo. They’re keeping it for the fifteen months I’m gone. It saves me the storage fees, and honestly a car just sitting untouched in a lot for over a year isn’t good for it anyway. It needs to be started, driven, used. So it made sense for everyone: I get one less thing to worry about, they get a car.

From there, Amtrak took me up to Newark, New Jersey, where I stayed overnight at a hotel near the airport. My father’s side of the family lives in that area, so we got dinner together that evening. I told them about the trip, about the fifteen months and the twenty-four countries, and got to feel their excitement alongside my own. It was also, quietly, a hard goodbye. Not dramatic, just the kind that sits with you, saying “see you in a year and a half” to people you love.

---

A 9:30 flight, and three hours of nothing

I was at the airport by 6:30 the next morning for a 9:30 departure. I’d been saving United miles for a while without a clear plan for them, and it turned out I had exactly enough to cover the flight to Heathrow. Not just covered, but in business class. For a trip built on a budget spreadsheet, starting it in a lie-flat seat I didn’t pay a dollar for felt like the universe throwing me a bone.

Then 9:30 became 12:30.

Some kind of refueling issue. The details never really got explained, which is its own kind of airline tradition. So there I was, the first morning of a fifteen-month trip I’d been planning for over a year, parked at a gate in Newark watching the departure time slide later and later.

I’ll be honest, I expected to be more annoyed than I was. But there’s something about having no deadline on the other end that changes how a delay lands. I wasn’t going to miss anything. Nobody was waiting for me. The whole point of this trip is that the clock stopped mattering. Might as well start practicing that on day one.

Once we were actually in the air, it was lovely. A real meal, a seat I could push back until it was very nearly flat, and enough room to stop bracing against my own shoulders. I spent most of the crossing reclined about as far as the thing would go.

What it wasn’t, though, was a redeye. This was a daytime flight, so for all that comfort, I never really slept. Horizontal and wide awake for seven hours.

So I leaned into the other thing. A couple of glasses of wine, because it seemed like the correct way to mark the occasion. The Devil Wears Prada sequel, which was fine. Perfectly watchable, not much more than that.

And a lot of Ren.

That part wasn’t planned. I put his music on somewhere out over the water and mostly left it there for the rest of the flight. Given where I was going and what was waiting at the other end of it, that felt about right. Seven hours over the Atlantic listening to the guy whose music is a big part of why I’m doing this at all.

---

Midnight at the hotel

Landed at Heathrow, cleared customs in a fog, and got to my hotel around midnight. Between the pre-dawn start in Newark, the three hours at the gate, and a seven-hour crossing I spent wide awake, I’d been going for the better part of a day by then.

I’d like to tell you I went out and had a first-night-in-London moment. I did not. I went almost straight to sleep, because the delay had eaten the evening and I had an early train the next morning.

That’s the unglamorous reality of a travel day. Sometimes arriving somewhere you’ve been dreaming about just means finding a bed.

---

Seven hours to Cornwall

The next morning I got on the train to Newquay, and I’ll give it to you straight: it was uneventful. It was just long. About seven hours of it.

I’d built this leg up in my head as some kind of scenic English rail journey, and parts of it genuinely were. The country shifts as you go west, cities giving way to green, motorways giving way to hedgerows and stone walls, until Cornwall starts to look like its own small place stitched onto the end of England. But seven hours is seven hours. There’s a stretch in the middle where you stop taking photos out the window and just sit with your own thoughts, which, depending on the day, is either meditative or a bit much.

Randy was on that train too. She’d boarded at London, same as me, and we knew it going in. What we hadn’t counted on was how full it would be. Assigned seats, no space to swap, so we spent the whole run west a few carriages apart, both heading to the same place and unable to do anything about it.

We finally caught up at Par. That’s where the main line lets you off and a little branch line carries you the rest of the way down to Newquay, so everyone bound for that stretch of coast ends up spilled onto the same platform waiting for the connection. Not a dramatic reunion. Just two people who’d been on the same train for hours, finally in the same place, comparing notes on the journey down.

If you’ve been reading a while, you know Randy. She shows up in the Brighton posts and again in the Manchester one, part of the Renegades crowd I’ve fallen in with over the last couple of years. We’ve now met up in a handful of different cities, always somewhere in the orbit of a Ren show, and somewhere along the way that stopped being coincidence and started being a friendship.

She’s doing the festivals with me. Boardmasters, Boomtown, the lot. Which means the opening month of this sabbatical isn’t the solo plunge I’d quietly braced myself for. There’s someone here who already understands why any of this matters, and I didn’t have to explain a thing.

Newquay, when we finally got there, felt like exhaling. Salt air, that grey-blue Atlantic light, and a bed that wasn’t moving. I didn’t do much that first evening. I didn’t need to.

---

First morning out

I got up and walked the town before doing anything else.

No plan, no list, nowhere I needed to be. I just wanted to see where I’d landed. Two days of trains and airports and departure boards, and I hadn’t actually looked at anything yet.

So here’s Newquay, more or less as I found it that first morning.

That’s my favorite version of a new place, before you know anything about it. Before you’ve worked out which streets you’ll end up using twice a day, or which coffee place is the one. Everything is still just arriving.

---

Why Newquay

Newquay isn’t a random first stop. Boardmasters is here, out on Fistral Beach, running today through the 9th. A surf contest and a music festival stacked on top of each other, which is a very Cornwall way to do things. It’s the reason this whole leg exists, and it’s why I built the UK stretch of the route the way I did.

Ren is playing.

If you’ve read anything else on this site, you know what that means to me. I’ve seen him before. But this will be the first time I see him perform his solo work, and I arranged a month of my life around the chance.

So the pre-dawn start, the three hours at the gate, the seven-hour train: this is what they were for. That’s the trade. You spend a full day getting somewhere by rail, and on the other end there’s a thing you’ve wanted for years.

From here it’s Brighton, then Boomtown, then back to Brighton for a longer stretch before London closes out the UK month. But that’s next week’s problem. Right now there’s a festival about four miles from where I’m sitting.

---

Day two

I keep waiting for this to feel bigger than it does.

Fifteen months, twenty-four countries, and so far it has been a train, a plane, another train, and a hotel room I barely saw. None of it felt like the opening of anything. It felt like travel. The ordinary, slightly tedious business of getting yourself from one place to another.

Maybe that’s the answer. I spent a year building this into an event in my head, and it turns out you don’t arrive at a sabbatical. You just wake up somewhere else, and then keep doing that.

---

If you’ve ever had a trip start with a delay that turned out not to matter, tell me about it. I’d like to hear I’m not the only one who needed the reminder.