One sub-quest of my pilgrimage to Forty-Two Places was following in the footsteps of Dirk Gently’s midnight cigarette quest. Mark and I did it in the daytime, and I must have been occupied by my MapMyRide app, a fantastically nifty little thing I had become addicted to during cycling training.
My plan was to use it throughout the trip to document my exact routes. I could turn it on and it would locate me anywhere in the world, make a map of everywhere I went, and share it with my husband once he returned home to the US. Technology is truly magical!
Once. I used the app this once. It never functioned properly again. I didn’t bother with it the rest of the trip. It might as well have sent Mark a suffusion of yellow for all that he was able to get an answer about my whereabouts.
Dirk thought he could find cigarettes at St. Pancras Station because he was a Londoner, and Adams, a confirmed Londoner by the time he wrote about Dirk, also knew the station was there. Both had the advantage of knowing the difference between the train station, underground station, and the industrial freight buildings surrounding them both.
As a non-Londoner, this is the point at which I became confused and lost.
Because it was not nighttime, “The muggers and pushers and pimps,” described in The Long, Dark, Tea-Time of The Soul were thankfully not in evidence. However, I was hungry, therefore it was lunchtime. I admit I was looking forward to the “hamburger salesmen” the book promised. Arriving at the intersection of Pentonville and York, I laughed at one of the many Adams jokes infinitely funnier in-situ: A McDonalds’ on every corner, as far as the eye could see, and not an edible burger in sight.
Despite my hunger, I refused to eat at any of the three McDonalds in spitting distance, on the grounds that I was not in a foreign country, on a once-in-a-lifetime-quest, to give in to doing things I was regularly tempted to do back home on any given Thursday.
I would do only wildly foreign and exciting things. Like getting myself lost.
Instead of crossing and continuing left, I veered right. Do not do this if your goal is the train or Tube stations. Walk on the left side.
I blame my own right, which was the wrong way, on the GPS. Or the exciting little railroad track icons visible on the map to the North. Whatever reason was the cause, the part of York Way I found myself walking along was all train tracks, all the time. No station. No way in and no way out. The many, many tracks, and presumably also the trains, were all protected from the silly humans who hoped to ride them by high fencing and concrete walls.
I walked slower and slower as I approached the dead end of York Way, the realization hitting me repeatedly over the head with the WHAM! WHAM! of an enraged eagle that there was no possible way to cross the wasteland of dozens of parallel train tracks. No bridge, no underpass, no secret rear-entrance. And by the time I saw Goods Way in the distance, I realized there was no going over, under, or through, and turned back.
In the correct direction this time—LEFT—I crossed York Way and waved at the other-other McDonald’s to get back on the right side of the tracks. The side with access to the station, and just a little ways away, “On the west side of Saint Pancras Street, just a few yards north of the Euston Road, a flight of steps leads up to the forecourt of the old Midland Grand Hotel, the huge, dark Gothic fantasy of a building which stands, empty and desolate, across the front of Saint Pancras railway station.”
The ruins of the old Midland Grand Hotel are now the shiny, renovated, new St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. A few days later, I would take the official tour (highly recommend!) and spend the night there.
If you want a nice meal, visit The Booking Office (also highly recommend!) inside…wait for it…the old booking office. It is now a pub and restaurant where you can eat beneath the vast, stone torches of Valhalla, held up by the invisible giants employed by the Norse Gods so you can see how pretty your food is. I enjoyed imbibing with friends and even the experience of bumping into a living breathing man who is one of the hotel ghosts.
But for that day, this was the end of Dirk’s walk for me. I wandered King’s Cross for a train schedule. Sized up St. Pancras to note the location of the First Class Lounge. Then Mark and I went down to The Underground station to catch the Tube to Liverpool Station, and our reservation time at Dennis Seaver’s House. If you haven’t been to Dennis Seaver’s House, I absolutely recommend it. I can’t say more, as it is the best secret in…probably in the whole UK…and I will keep it, but it is highly recommended!
(Mark recommends it too.)
What do you think?