Today was my dear, sweet, and beautiful wife Melissa's birthday.
We woke up at Cathy's house around 7:40. We already had our stuff laid out to wear for the day, so all we did was grab our piles and take a shower. Well I suppose that would be too easy for us when we needed to get to the airport on time. When I say 'shower' I mean that we kneeled in the tiny European bathtub and sprayed water over ourselves with a handheld showerhead that had low water pressure. Lather, Rinse, and repeat as necessary.
We left her house at 8:30, the same time that she needed to leave to get her daughter Chloe to school. I was worried about the amount of fuel in the car, but we glided into the Hertz return area on fumes. We paid to be allowed to bring the car back without a full tank of gas, but in the last few days had discovered that, even though the original guy behind the desk said we'd save money this way, it was a colossal rip off. DO NOT MAKE OUR MISTAKE! So we ended up eating about 15 EUR overcharge (only that little since there was probably less than 1 liter of fuel in the tank) and headed to our departure gate.
The way Ryanair works is that the flight is relatively cheap, but they charge you for every little nicety and thing they can. Any drinks or water available? CHARGE! Seat-back pockets with a magazine and vomit bag? FORGET ABOUT IT! Want to reserve a seat so you know where you will be on the aircraft? NO WAY! We survived the hour-long flight from Dublin to Stansted to find a giant hole in the side of our checked bag. But did they do anything about that? Nope.
We caught the Stansted Express train that took us to Liverpool Street Station (another 47 min) and then rode the Underground train to Great Portland Street. We walked to the apartment that they had arranged for us to store our luggage and proceeded to wash our nasty clothes FOR FREE.
We got through to Mary and Lily on Skype for a short amount of time, and once everyone met up at the apartments, left on the Underground to have dinner at Cotto (near the Lambeth North stop). After Cotto we walked over to the London Eye and all took a ride, although this must have been frustrating to the others in our same car that our group of 20 ended up taking over and making a ruckus. Being stuck in this din for 30 minutes was beginning to drive me mad, but fortunately (and before it sent me into a 'mood' again) the ride was soon over and we were heading back to the apartments.
Siraj had been busy working on wedding stuff and couldn't join us for any of the earlier stuff, but had been busy loading all our suitcases and other pieces of luggage onto a shuttle. We split our group between the shuttle and another van and drove down to our destination of the night, the Donnington Valley Hotel. We all hung out a little bit, Melis and I played a game of Fluxx with Adam and Devin, and I finished up posting the pictures from the previous few days onto the blog.
And now to bed, at 1:30am. Hopefully this can still be a restful night for what could turn out to be a pretty full day tomorrow.
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