Back in the day, I used to be really good about associating a trip report to the correct date, regardless of when I actually wrote it or posted it. I’m not quite sure how to do that in WordPress, and who cares anyway.
It’s currently Wed. July 31, day 5 of the trip, and I’m in Buxton at last. This is my only free day before full-cast rehearsals start tomorrow. For some reason, the laptop refused to connect either to the hotel wifi or my phone as a hotspot when I was in London, but it’s working here at the Old Hall. I’m sitting in the parlor, listening to a bunch of oldies, clearly Festival regulars, chatting away.
Last Friday was the night I left. Luckily, Fridays are half-days in the summer for my company, so I was able to fairly leisurely do laundry, finish packing, do bills, and close up the apartment. I had a 9:00 pm flight from JFK. Traffic to/from JFK is always a mess, particularly on a weekend when lots of people are trying to get out to Long Island. I got an Uber around 5:45 or so. He took what I considered a roundabout way to get on the route, but we got to JFK in plenty of time.
I was unusually anxious and wasn’t quite sure why – except it became obvious once I got there. I have never known how to pack lightly, and I really hate wearing clothes I’ve already worn and not laundered. So what with clothes, including costume pieces for the show, and my CPAP machine and my scores etc, I had a heavy suitcase and a heavy duffel bag, in addition to my carry-on stuff. I’ve mildly amused to observe a change in airport process – the new thing is to have everyone print their own luggage tags, put them on the bags, and send them through a scanner, but everyone is so bad at it, they have helpers who will essentially do it for you. So for some reason, there wasn’t a lot of traffic around the Virgin Atlantic desk, so I had a very friendly helper who did all this. She led me to the scanner and weigher and so forth, and as feared, the suitcase was too heavy. However, the duffel bag was under enough that after a couple of attempts of transferring stuff from one to another, got them balanced out and under weight. Helper lady was very patient, I must say.
And then my anxiety dropped away and I realized it had all been about the luggage. Go figure.
Through security, no fear, and to the gate. Friends of mine also flying to the festival (but straight to Manchester, not to London) posted on Facebook a picture of themselves waiting at their gate. I commented on theirs that I was too, and we didn’t find out til later, but it turned out they were actually at the next gate over and we could have hung out!
No real problem boarding – i was flying “premium” (i.e., ‘middle’) class and we were the second boarding group. I was on the aisle in a middle group of 3, and the other two were a couple, which mean the middle seat lady climbed over her man, not over me, when she had to get out. I felt a little cramped, and actually could have put my knapsack over my head rather than under the seat, because (oddly enough) there was plenty of overhead space. Usually, people are fighting over it.
Up in the air. I knitted, read, waited for dinner. They’d given us prosecco when we first got on, and reviewing the website about premium seating, it looked like all other drinks would be a la carte but that was not true. I had some more wine, and the fish dinner, which was fine, then tried to sleep – my favorite ‘coming in and out of sleep’ moment was hearing some child chattering to his mother at what was to us about 1:30 am, and her saying, “that’s nice, dear, but Mom’s trying to sleep”.
I got about 3 hours of sleep, and woke up to them serving breakfast. I guess the Wegovy is working, the last thing I wanted was breakfast, but I did get coffee.
No problem getting off the plane. Our luggage was a bit late – they apologized over the intercom, there was some ‘equipment failure’. I had time to use the bathroom, change shoes, get some cash from the ATM, and put on my neck pouch. After stupidly losing my wallet in Toronto, I’d decided I needed to ‘tourist paranoid’ and put my passport and several cards in a neck pouch beneath my shirt, just leaving one credit card and the cash for the pockets.
Like Oslo, if you’re familiar with the London transport system, there really isn’t a need to take the ‘airport express’ train, but I was happy to do that. It goes straight to Paddington, and I was staying in a hotel right around the corner from it, the Pilgrm. Drew and Liz had recommended it as quirky, fun and nicely located. They were right! The best thing was even though I showed up at 10 am with no expectation except leaving my bags until my room was ready, my room was ready already! They had a coffee bar in the lobby with spigots with still and sparkling water (and they gave you a reusable bottle to refill for your stay) and I got a welcome iced coffee.
Got myself cleaned up, unpacked a bit. Room was warm – turns out despite my research as to the weather, it was always unremittingly sunny and humid – but there was a big floor fan that worked really nicely.
Hotel was an easy walk to Kensington Gardens, but I’d done that string of parks from St. James’s west back in 2008, so decided to go to Regent’s Park, about which I knew nothing. I could have tubed there, but walked (about a half hour), and then followed a walking tour I found online. Very pretty, but again, unremittingly sunny (I stayed in the shade when possible.) (It has never been ghastly hot, but the sun and humidity has been unrelenting, and I’ve sweated through everything I’ve worn. Luckily, I got to drop off some laundry today.)
Walked across to Camden Town – it was about 2:00, so I stopped for an iced coffee and a toastie and a cookie. Then to Camden Market, which was quite intense and quite crowded (beautiful day, and a Saturday). I did a lot of poking around, but stayed out of the shops, and was carefully monitoring my personal ‘aaaaugh all the people’ alarms and energy. Headed to the Camden Town subway station, but was surprised to find that they were not letting anyone in to the station, only out – I was told to go walk down to Mornington Crescent, which made me laugh, since, from what my British friends had described, this was playing out exactly like the game.
Back to the hotel for a rest and to get cleaned up. Then went to the hotel lounge, which I’d assumed was a pub-type thing, but was really a wine bar. Had a couple of glasses of white, tried to get my laptop to connect to the wifi (failed), and used my Ipad to research how and when to get to Cambridge and Oxford.
Looked for local restaurants, decided to go to Bizzarro. Turned out that that area has a bunch of Italian restaurants, but none of them had Caesar salads, more’s the pity. I got a glass of red, a green salad and a calamari appetizer. Constant reminders throughout the day of ‘they don’t do it here like they do at home’, and here it was that they served the calamari with tartar sauce, not marinara sauce – which was fine. They had homemade tiramisu, so of course I had to have that.
And so to bed.
Part of travel anxiety for me is you kind of spend every day doing things you’ve never done before, or haven’t done for years (ride on a certain transit system, for instance). And you don’t do it the best or most efficient way, because you just don’t know. And you come to realize that in your normal life, you’ve surround yourself with systems to travel through life as efficiently and pleasantly as possible to suit you, and suddenly all that’s gone and everything is just a bit of a struggle. It’s not a problem if you realize that’s what’s happening and don’t get upset about it – and just give yourself time to recharge and also just to realize it’s pretty funny and how blessed you are to have such a life to begin with.
Next up – Cambridge!
(I will say that I easily could have reached out to my Londoner friends to see if anyone wanted to get together or go on my day trips with me and I declined to do that. And that’s a social anxiety thing and I’ll put that in the queue to talk to my shrink about. So, apologies to my friends, I wasn’t trying to snub anyone.)
The Toast Point Page 