A Quick Trip to Newcastle.

Today was my sister's graduation so naturally the whole family journeyed up to Newcastle to support her. It was a pretty packed 48 hours including an expired railcard, two busy train journeys, a World Cup final, some brief tourist snaps, lots of official graduation ceremonies, a lost camera bag, tons of coffee trips, and an emergency ride on the Metro.
Like all our family trips, everything didn't go exactly to plan. A few hours before our train on Sunday, my sister realised her railcard had expired which meant we had to leave much earlier to renew it at King's Cross and avoid a mega fine. We stayed at an incredible hotel, the 'Malmaison', on the Quayside. It had that stylish and luxurious interior which made it all feel very glamourous. Plus, there was a Starbucks next to reception which was like a dream come true. Our next crisis struck about fifteen minutes before Alice's graduation ceremony started: Dad lost his camera which meant losing all of the important photos he had taken that day... and a very expensive camera. He would have missed Alice graduate had a kind security guard not picked it up. The final crisis of the trip was when the taxi failed to pick us up when we had a train to catch. Instead of waiting it out, we ran for the Metro and even had time to spare.
It was an exhausting, yet memorable, couple of days. Watching my sister graduate with a first class degree has only made me more excited to start uni again in September. Plus Newcastle is such an interesting city. My only regret is that we didn't get to explore more. We just about had time to take a photo on the Millennium bridge before it started raining... that breeze was not so photo-friendly.
The trip was so quick that it almost feels like it didn't happen. For now though, it's back to reality.