We Had Big Plans

By Christina Harning

After an incredible month of backpacking Europe, my best friend Alex and I left London to visit Shakespeare’s home, Stratford-upon-Avon. But on the way, we detoured through Oxford so we could stop in at the "Eagle and Child" bar, which Tolkien, Lewis, and other Inklings frequented.

We had big plans for our visit to Stratford....! We were going to see the second-to-last showing of "King Lear" starring Ian McKellen, a hero of ours, at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I called to see if tickets were available. The lady told me they were sold out. The sinking feeling of disappointment spread. (I later learned they were sold out in October. It's now July.) However, the lady then told me about the "queue," where people who couldn’t make the showing could give their tickets back to the theater to sell. Excitedly, I asked her when we should get in the queue - she said "now." We were at least two hours away...

So, we chugged our beers and ran back to the train station to head to Stratford-Upon-Avon. We skipped the sightseeing, deciding to take care of that while waiting in line, and booked it straight to the theater. Through some miracle, we got tickets! And, not just any tickets. FRONT ROW. In the small Shakespearean theater, when you sat in the front row, you couldn’t cross your legs because your knees touched the stage. When the actors were on stage, we could have touched them as they walked by. It was amazing being in the presence of such gifted, famous actors... plus, we saw Ian McKellen naked. I will never look at "Gandalf" the same way.

One thing we forgot to do was check the train timetable. The last train left three hours ago. We were stranded in Stratford-upon-Avon, a tiny town full of bed-and-breakfasts all reserved months in advance. Places here don’t open their doors at midnight. After wandering for hours, we enlisted the help of a night porter. He called the Holiday Inn, who claimed to be sold out due to a conference. But we thought, hey, it’s a Holiday Inn, they have a lobby with some couches we could crash on – as it was actually a really cold night and we weren’t prepared to park-bench it.

In the end, the concierge, ready to kick us out upon seeing us settling in on the couches, told us he had a room available. Grateful not to sleep in the cold, we checked into a 200-pound-per-night room (think $400). We look back on this experience with laughter and the phrase "Of course."

About This Traveler

Christina Harning is a graduate of Western Michigan University. She's been to Canada, Bahamas, Mexico, England, Scotland, France, Monaco, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. She travels every summer! "My most memorable moment was unknowingly arriving in Nice on the date of the "Ocean's 13" premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. We barely made the train from Nice to Cannes but arrived in front of the premiere at exactly the right time to see the entire cast coming down the red carpet: Matt Damon, George Clooney, Brad Pitt with Angelina Jolie, Don Cheadle, Ellen Arkin, Andy Garcia ... and more!" Christina's ultimate backpacking trip was traveling this past summer across Europe, where she met tons of amazing people from different countries who spoke multiple languages and told hilarious stories with incredible accents. "If I could have, I would have stayed the entire summer, and included more stops, like Athens, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm."