Our trip to London: Getting there and away

As if we didn't have enough to do in our final weeks in Ireland, I decided that I wanted to fit in a bit of travel before we hit the road.  So, at 3:20 AM last Friday (over a week ago) Mike, Nova and I jogged to the bus stop to catch the citylink bus to Shannon, and the 6:30 AM Ryan Air flight to Stanstead.  

This was my first experience with Ryan Air, and I'd heard some pretty bad feedback. My main problem was the booking process. The online booking system automatically assigned us to the 06:30 flight. I clicked the option to select the early afternoon flight, for a few euro more.  I went on through the booking system. Lo and behold, at the end of it, I was still on the blasted 6:30.  I was not pleased. It took me four days to get back in to the booking system to change the reservation. Then they wanted to charge me 170 euro, more than the original ticket, to make the change. I decided that we would just have to suck up and take the 6:30.

So there we were, trotting to catch the bus, with Nova still mostly asleep. I'd had a good three hours' nap, and Mike had elected to blast through and not sleep at all. I'd packed some slightly squished strawberries to snack on. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. On the bus, Nova and I munched on a few.  As the bus pulled in to Shannon, Nova threw up all over both of us.  

Fortunately, I was prepared, with a clean shirt for myself and a fresh outfit for Nova.  I even had a spare carrier, but getting it out proved to be too much effort.  We arrived at Stanstead on time, made our way to the train, and discovered another  reason it might have been better to fly Aer Lingus: the train from Stanstead to London is ridiculously expensive.

Finding a cab to take us to my friends' house seemed more difficult than it should have been, but we were all pretty dazed and confused  at that point.  In addition, I was developing a queasy headache. I figured that it was just because I was tired, but a few hours after we arrived I found myself running to the toilet to empty my stomach. 

For the return trip, we didn't have to get out of bed until 5 AM, and no one threw up, but we were just as exhausted when we got home.  Getting there and back was a bit of a hassle, but totally worth it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I
Read more

Spanische Windtorte

Image
When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that
Read more

Transatlantic Baby

Nova is about to embark on her fourth transatlantic flight since she got out of the womb.  I wish we didn't have to go back and forth so much, but that's just how it's turned out. The first flight was on New Year's Eve, when she was just over a month old.  She surprised me by sleeping almost the whole way from Newark airport to her grandmother's house in Galway.  On the next two flights, I traveled alone with her, and honestly it wasn't so bad.  The flight attendants on Continental pretty much ignored us, and offered me no extra help.  Aer Lingus was a different story, with the flight attendants all offering to hold her and walk up and down the aisles, or sit with her if I needed to go to the toilet.   Each time, I've brought a little less with us.  This time Nova's equipment will consist of a stack of disposable diapers, a small towel, a blanket, a change of clothes, some cotton wool, a teething ring, baby tylenol and bum ointment just in case, maybe a
Read more