The 29 December Rule: How to Travel for New Year’s Eve

Every year, the last days of December produce the same two scenes.

In one, people are already where they meant to be. There’s a half-unpacked suitcase in the corner, a slightly unfamiliar view from the window, the quiet luxury of having time to decide between a walk, a nap, or another coffee. The year hasn’t ended yet, but the rush has.

In the other, the clock is doing something different. Delays stack up; departure boards flicker; “engineering works” turns out to mean a bus in the rain. It’s nobody’s fault in particular - it’s snow, or a broken power cable, or simply too many people trying to thread themselves through the same narrow point in the system at once.

Both scenes can belong to perfectly organised, perfectly intelligent people. The only difference is when they tried to move.

Today, for example, Eurostar has just suspended services after a power failure in the Channel Tunnel, leaving New Year’s travellers marooned at St Pancras under the departure boards, clutching dying phones and lukewarm Pret. In the Cambridge area, the railways have been in festive surgery mode since the 27th, with buses replacing trains and journeys stretching into small odysseys of hi-vis and roadworks. 

Meanwhile, the calendar says 30 December.

Which is why I’m finally writing down a rule I’ve enforced on myself for years:

After a few years of watching this play out and, occasionally, playing the role of the person under the departure board, I’ve ended up with one small, bossy principle:

The 29 December Rule

For a good New Year’s Eve, you have to be in situ by the evening of 29 December.

Not “halfway to Paris”.

Not “just popping down to London first”.

Not “I’ll grab a lunchtime train on the 31st, it’ll be fine”.

Actually there. Bags inside the room, toothbrush in a glass, shoes by the door, your name mentally attached to this new place.

The 30th is chaos. The 31st is a gamble. The 29th is grace.

New Year’s Eve should not be a commute

Somewhere along the way (in part due to the glamour of the distant past), New Year’s turned into a logistical obstacle course: finish work, squeeze in last-minute errands, then fling yourself at an overstretched transport network and hope to arrive at your destination in time to become suddenly radiant and transcendent by 11:59 pm.

Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s brutal: not just because plans are ruined, but because of what New Year’s often represents. People aren’t just trying to “get away”; they’re trying to close one year and open another in a particular place, with particular people.

The romance of the “spontaneous New Year getaway” is mostly a storytelling trick. In reality:

• You spend the 30th in queues, on hold, or refreshing apps.

• You spend the 31st recovering from the 30th.

• At midnight, your body still thinks it’s in transit.

Being in place by the 29th doesn’t guarantee a perfect evening, but it does mean the date in your diary and the date in your nervous system match.

Avoiding the liminal waiting room

Over the holidays, we inevtiably see stations, airports, even a bus interchange outside a town whose name you never quite catch – all suddenly full of people whose New Year has become an exercise in resourcefulness: phone batteries, snacks, petrol, patience...

Nobody plans to spend the 30th like that. Nobody deserves it. It happens because so many of us, understandably, try to squeeze the last possible drop out of the working year, or save a night’s accommodation, or trust that “it’ll be fine, it always is”.

The 29 December Rule isn’t about feeling superior to the people whose journeys went wrong. It’s about acknowledging that the system itself is fragile on those particular days, and stepping sideways out of its most volatile hours is the most luxurious way about it.

Up in and around Cambridge, it’s more polite but no less real – engineering works that mean “Cambridge” is technically open, but only if you fancy a bus safari between Royston and Cambridge North. The sort of thing that looks fine on a PDF timetable in November and feels apocalyptic when you’re hauling a suitcase across a car park in the dark on 30 December.

Less jailbreak, more downtime

When you’re already in place by the 29th, New Year’s Eve stops being an escape – the great annual jailbreak from your daily life – and becomes much more ritualistic.

You’re no longer asking one hurried evening, plus a few fireworks, to erase twelve months of fatigue. You’re finally giving the end of the year a frame: letting it unspool in one particular setting, with enough time for your (holiday-sluggish) senses to catch up.

You start noticing the small, local rituals. You get a chance to catch up with friends, squeeze into a local wine bar, sample food or even a museum you'd have missed otherwise.

From there, you can be choosy. You don’t have to take the first dinner reservation that will have you. You can say no to the “iconic” thing in favour of the smaller, kinder option. You aren’t operating from scarcity or panic.

The logistics are the luxury

It’s easy to confuse “special” with “far”.

But the older, more quietly luxurious move is margin. Not the five-star hotel (though that’s preferred, of course), but the decision to leave on the 27th or 28th, to be fully landed by the 29th, to give yourself not just a night but a run-up.

Luxury is:

• being unhurried on the 30th

• being available to your own mood rather than your train app

• having the bandwidth to improvise

It’s the ability to look at the inevitable December travel chaos and think: next year, I’m opting out of that storyline in advance.

So, for future New Year travellers of a Peregrina disposition:

If you’re travelling for New Year’s Eve, treat 29 December, 20:00 as your internal arrival deadline. By then, you are fed, showered, a little bit oriented, and physically where you meant to be.

The 30th is for learning the light, finding the bakery, choosing where you might like to stand at midnight.

The 31st is for pleasure, not problem-solving. Everything else is just gambling with overhead power lines and replacement buses.

And the house, as we’ve just seen, usually wins.