I’m currently chilling in my London hotel, thinking about how I have to fly home tomorrow. Isn’t going home the pits?? At least I can bring back fond memories of this trip as I write about them for y’all!

Although it’s Tuesday now, I have to think alllll the way back to Friday for this post. The morning didn’t start off great for two reasons – lack of sleep and train hiccups. Although I slept fine on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, for whatever reason, my brain was just not looking for any sleep on Thursday night, at least not until about 2 or 3 AM – ugh! I didn’t have to wake up early for anything because our train to Brighton wasn’t meant to be until 11:30 AM*, but I was thinking I’d still wake up at a normal-for-me time (I almost never sleep late at home) to take a walk or do some blogging, but it ended up being about 9:30 before I could actually be classified as awake again. No problem though, as that still should have given me plenty of time to shower and get packed up before walking around the corner to the station. But oh noooooo! A little before 10, I realized I hadn’t yet double-checked the train schedule, so I did, only to realize the train we thought was at 11:30 AM was actually at 10:42 AM! Now, that’s not a huge difference considering the station is around corner, but knowing I had stuff to pack and hadn’t showered yet and also that Felicity was just starting to pack up her stuff, we had to get a move on! “Shoving” may have been a slightly more accurate description than “packing” for our stuff that morning, but we got it done and left the hotel with enough time to get our train.

BUT OH NOES! It turned out that our train was screwed up because of issues on the line, so we couldn’t get to the first station on our ticket. For the first time in my life, I used an train station information point to ask someone from Transport for London what to do when, as if by magic, a train going to our connecting station (Norwood Junction) showed up. Huzzah! We jumped on and settled in…only to be told a couple of stops later that someone forgot to tell the driver that he couldn’t GET to that station and that the rest of the journey was canceled. Isn’t that just loverly?? We tried another information point at the station we made it to (New Cross Gate, which means we were further out of London already) and were told to ask the staff at the station, so we did. Thankfully, we met a super helpful employee named Andrew who said that, because there had been issues all morning, no one could question our tickets if we took an alternate route to get to Brighton because we paid to get there and it wasn’t our fault the schedules were disrupted. He told us to take the next train back to London (London Bridge, specifically) and to just take a direct train to Brighton from there. And he said that if anyone DID question us that we should tell them to call Andrew at New Cross Gate and he would set them straight. 🙂 Thank you, Andrew!!

Photos at Brighton Station that prove we made it there after all.

As it happens, we were able to make it to Brighton exactly the way Andrew told us to. We got in maybe 45 minutes later than we otherwise would have, but as we didn’t have any plans, that didn’t matter anyway. In fact, it may have worked in our favor because we were both able to get into our hotel rooms because they had just finished preparing them by the time we arrived in Brighton and made the 20-minute walk from the station to our hotel. Incidentally, that hotel was 27 Brighton, a cute guesthouse with quaint little rooms located in Kemptown, very close to the seafront. It seems like it USED to be a B&B, but note that isn’t the case anymore as they don’t serve any food. I saw comments in a couple of reviews that people were surprised by that, but the website doesn’t call it out, so there shouldn’t be any confusion. There are only 4-5 rooms and I picked the smallest room with a single bed, but it was still cute. Definitely small, but functionally designed so it still worked well. Sleeping on a single bed wasn’t the pinnacle of comfort, but I managed for two nights. 🙂 Check out the photos below and you can figure out if it might work for you, too!

I knew the building was pink from what I saw on their website, but the 27 sign is actually pretty small, so it took a minute to see it.

The narrow staircase leads to other rooms, but my lil’ room, Steine, was on the ground floor.

Like I said, it’s small, but pretty functional.

Why Brighton anyway? While both of us do have friends there, we were actually there because our friend Matt generously offered to drive us to a Doctor Who event on the Saturday and it didn’t make any sense for him to come to London, nor did we want to try and get up suuuuuper early on Saturday to get to Brighton to then make the drive to Rye (and the train troubles we already had validate why that could have been bad!), so we decided to just stay these two nights in Brighton. After we got to the hotel though, we didn’t have any plans until we were due to meet Matt and our other friend Steve for dinner, so Felicity decided to nap (great idea anytime you’re on vacation, but she also hadn’t slept well, so was ready for a rest), while I opted to take a walk around Brighton in the warm sunshine. I unpacked a little (mostly bathroom stuff, since there wasn’t a lot of space to put clothes into) and changed into the ONE pair of shorts I brought before heading out. Although they were more of the “lounge-y” variety, I knew I’d be more comfortable walking in them than in jeans, given how nice it was. 🙂 It’s been a good few years since I visited Brighton, but I enjoyed the walk and found some faves to photograph on the way.

I always enjoy seeing Brighton Pier, though I didn’t walk down it this time (there’s a £2 fee just to do that).

I wanted to walk through North Laine for some people-watching on my way back to the hotel. Such a great day for it!

After a frazzled start to the day, the 4.5-mile walk was just what the doctor ordered. The rest of the day was spent chilling at the hotel and then heading to drinks (Bierhaus) and dinner (Bayleaf) after Steve and Matt finished working for the day. It was so good to see them both! We had a great time catching up with some delicious Indian food. It’s good for the spirit to spend time with friends like this!

My butter chicken and onion bahji were delish! The ice cream was really tasty as well, but it wasn’t particularly Indian – haha!

Felicity is always better at remembering to get photos like this, so she’s kindly let me use them here.

We wrapped up our night after dinner, especially knowing three of us had to be on the road to Rye before 8 AM (Steve didn’t join us, sadly). It was a nice, chill day, despite the erratic start to the day. Up next is the post about the whole reason we made this trip in the first place!