Pretravelling
AAAAAH. Why is there always so much damn stuff to do before leaving? Last week I was SO SURE that I could undergo regular working hours right up until about 3 hours before my spoke flight, at which point I’d get casually whisked off in a car and dumped pleasantly at the airport terminal. As the days of this week have progressed, so has my panic been ramping up. And it’s not purely unreasonable panic — the list of crap to do before leaving has grown exponentially. Yes, exponentially. First there was one thing, then two things and now there are totally about FOUR things on it.
I’m not even away for very much more than one week. And that week is chopped up into little packages of visits, so the entire thing is like a handful of candy, and will have passed before I’ve even really started to appreciate the jetlag. And yet that has just about zero correlation with my level of stress.
I could bitch about specific things (e.g., my supervisor coming back from holiday right after I leave, making it look like I have taken a disproportionately large amount of time off; the weather forecast predicting T storms for Thursday…) but that would be probably be really boring. So I’ll hide them in those parantheses, instead, and try and put on a happy face for another 48 hours.
And if that fails there’s always the airport bar…
Londoning
Hi! We’re suffering from mostly a lack of internet availability right now due to spending a weeks worth of holiday time madly rushing around Britain and Holland. I am currently in a hotel on Tottenham Court Road in London, which being kinda businessy actually has free wireless. Hoorah! Yesterday we were in Cambridge for my stepfather’s 60th birthday celebrations. Tomorrow we will be in Sheffield. My feet are currently aching from traipsing around the British Museum and Covent Garden, and they will be receiving a hell of a lot more punishment in the coming days.
So far this trip is going a lot better than last time in which I spent two nights sleeping in airports (well, except the second time I gave up and got a hotel room) and also had my luggage lost for a week. It was all Delta’s fault. This time we had to get back off the connecting plane almost immediately after taxiing because of “visibility issues”, but as our next layover was four and a half hours long it didn’t really screw us up.
I also discovered that a fantastic method of avoiding jetlag is to get somewhat drunk. That way you can’t tell if your uncertainty and confusion is due to wine or not-sleeping. Well, it worked for me anyway…
Okay, time to choose a restaurant for tonight!