BenCrowder.net

Note: I’m dashing these out as quickly as I can, because I know that if I try to polish them, it’ll be next year before you read about them. So, in the interest of getting the news out while it’s still somewhat fresh, here’s the writeup on my trip to London.

Second note: If I try to go in and add pictures, this is going to take even longer, so instead you can just hie on over to my England! photoset on Flickr and check out the pictures there.

Backstory

For most of my life I dreamed of going to England, but it took tillthe beginning of December for me to finally do something about it. (I’d always had excuses — money, time, you name it — and kept finding reasons to pansy out, which made no sense since I really, really wanted to do this. The trick was simply clicking the purchase button. Once those tickets were paid for, there was no backing out. :))

Over the next two and a half months I sprinkled together some semblance of a plan for the trip. Google Maps was especially handy in figuring out where everything is in London (as was the travel guide I bought). In fact, as I went from site to site buying theatre tickets and reserving hostel rooms and such, I found myself seriously wondering how people ever got by without the web. (Not all was butter-smooth, however; in the middle of this, the Seatwave debacle began to stir. But more on that later.)

Thursday, 2.19.09

My excitement kicked me awake at 3:30. Early even for me, and half an hour earlier than I’d planned, so I glanced over my Twitter stream (someone from Seatwave sent me a response) and then returned to bed.

Four o’clock. (Why did I even bother going back to sleep? I have no idea.) I finished my last-minute preparations, throwing my contacts and toothbrush and deodorant and other toiletries into my mostly empty suitcase. I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t.

The shuttle arrived around 6:30, with a longhaired, bearded snowboarder behind the wheel. He works three days a week and boards the rest. (I found this out because one of my fellow passengers was a snowboarder heading to a competition at Tahoe. The other two passengers were an older couple; the woman had a bad back and I could smell coffee breath curling off of the man, who was sitting next to me.)

I napped a little on the way to the airport, which seemed like a good idea until I woke up and felt my sense of balance playing spin the tail on the donkey. Not the way I wanted to start this trip. Jiggling my head, I tried to undrowsify myself so I wouldn’t look stoned to the airport people. (I realize now, of course, that they’re used to seeing zombie sacks of tiredness. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t get much sleep.)

Finding a kiosk was easy enough. Getting it to accept my confirmation number turned out to be impossible, however. I tried punching in the ticket number. Still no go. I was too tired to panic, so I looked around, found a lady in a uniform, and explained what was up. (“Please don’t think I’m a terrorist trying to sneak onto a plane,” I’m thinking.) (Hey, I was tired.) She had me get in line at the counter, and the rest of the airport entry process went seamlessly. (This was one of the rare times in my life when I didn’t set off the metal detector. Seriously, I can count them on one hand.)

And before long we were in the air. I read Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century for most of the flight. When we arrived in Houston, I foraged around and got a not-quite-large-enough lasagna from the airport café, then realized I had no idea which terminal my connecting flight was leaving from. It didn’t seem to be the one I was at (Terminal A), so I wandered around like I knew where I was going, then spotted a sign saying you had to take a shuttle bus to the other terminals, and some of the terminal letters had the Continental logo under them. Bingo.

(And now for a tangent on airport culture. It fascinates me, this microcosm of society, a self-contained world of sorts based on constant fluctuation. I could spend all day watching people in the airport. If I did that, though, I’d probably get a visit from Homeland Security or something.)

Sitting there in the terminal waiting to board, I looked around, wondering who would play major roles in the adventure to come en route to London. Then I caught myself and with a tsk tsk tried to remind myself that life is not a movie. Didn’t entirely succeed. (And of course my overactive imagination kept thinking, “What if we crash? What if this turns into LOST? Or that plane that crashed in the Hudson? Will I be the first to twitter it, assuming I survive?” I have yet to find a muzzle for my imagination.) A huge group of elementary school age kids boarded the plane first — forty or fifty of them. That would certainly make for an interesting twist, I thought to myself, if something disastrous did in fact happen and we had to figure out how to get all those kids safely off the plane. (It’s hard to stop thinking like a writer. We’re all about drama.)

So, I found my seat on the plane, hoping I’d end up sitting next to the future Mrs. Crowder. Nobody ever did end up sitting next to me, however. (I hope that’s not foreshadowing.) At first I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the overhead light, making a fool of myself by pressing every button in sight, trying to rotate the light, pushing on the ceiling, everything. I finally got it (without resorting to asking for help, proudly), but then couldn’t find the headphones for the in-flight movie. When one of the attendants brought some to me, I then spent a solid five minutes trying to figure out where on earth they plugged in. (If you haven’t noticed, the engineer in me likes solving problems on his own. The harder, the better.) Just before I was about to cave in and ask someone for help, I fingered the front of the armrest and voila! Two holes for the plug.

I watched City of Ember, then slept for an hour. When I woke up, I heard two girls talking in English accents a few rows back. This is when it started feeling like a dream. “I’m going to be in England in a few hours,” I thought to myself. Oh my goodness. I was really, actually, truly going to be in England. Up to this point my entire experience with England had been through books and movies — seeing it through others’ eyes — and so the dream feeling fit rather well. That’s what stories and films are, anyway — captured dreams.

I could have gone back to my Tolkien book, but for some reason I much preferred watching movies. I think this is because plane rides are so long that you want to put yourself into as a catatonic a state as possible, and movies do that a lot better than books. :) And so the rest of my flight consisted of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland.