A Series of Unfortunate Events

Ciao!

This past week was our second travel week and I headed off to London, Edinburgh, and Dublin with my friend Carly! I had a wonderful time this week, but my friend and I definitely hit some speed bumps on the way. Now I want to preface this post by saying that I loved every city that I went to and I recommend that every person makes the British Aisles trip at some point in their lifetime and that the numerous unfortunate happenings we dealt with had nothing to do with the cities involved. You know, sometimes stuff happens on a trip and it just doesn’t go your way, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t have a swell time. However, here are the top five most unfortunate moments from our trip (in chronological order).

1. Friday night, our flight arrives in the London Stansted Airport at 11:00 pm. We are supposed to meet our friends from Furman at their hotel in Bloomsbury. They gave us very strict instructions to get on the bus and get off at the Liverpool stop; then take the Piccadilly Line to their hotel. We knew what we were supposed to do. However, the line to get our passports stamped took over an hour and we didn’t even leave the airport until 12:30 am. We took the bus into London. I didn’t realize how far Stansted was from the actual city, but the bus took a whole hour to get to our stop. This puts us on Liverpool street in the freezing cold with our backpacks at 1:30 in the morning. We look over and the tube is closed (it closes at midnight. fun fact). “Its ok,” we said. We figured that we would just hail a cab that could take us to the hotel. Unfortunately, London cabs do not like to stop for anyone. They would just shake their heads at us. We stood out in the cold for half an hour, bringing us to 2:00 am. This is where panic started to slightly set in. We had no way of contacting our friends and we had no way of getting to their hotel. Frustration came. Carly started crying. I started cursing. Its not one of my best attributes, but times like this… what can you do? We finally decided to just run out in front of a cab and demand that he drive us. He did and it was the best cab ride I ever took. I didn’t even care how much it cost at that point (it wasn’t too bad though… eight pounds each). We finally made it to the hotel where we were greeted by tired friends and a warm bed. Thank goodness!

 

2. So Monday morning, I wake up for my last day in London. I’m super pumped about the day ahead, but there is something strange with my left eye. It was bright red, swollen, oozing goop, and burned. I had noticed that my left eye had been slightly winking in every picture that weekend, but I didn’t think anything of it. So here I was, my last day in London, heading off to the Optometrist. Luckily, you can easily find Optometrist offices all over London and they saw me right away. To my delight, it wasn’t pink eye so I wasn’t contagious. However, they diagnosed me with something that involved tiny ulcers all along the inside of my eye lids. We took the aggressive treatment approach to fixing this problem. I had to put two eyedrops in my eye every half hour for the first day and then every one hour then next day and so on. I don’t know if you have ever thought about it, but there are A LOT of half hours in the day. We really felt time going by. Now my eye is fine and has healed. It was just kind of a bummer for all the pictures I took. I either had a puffy, red eye or my glasses on… oh well.

3. Monday evening comes around and we were about to leave for Edinburgh, Scotland where we were planning on staying with a friend of mine from high school. However, right before we leave for the airport I get a message from my friend saying that her whole flat had gotten lice. Well, we weren’t going to stay there because I was not adding a case of lice to go with my eye infection. Haha. We didn’t let this get us down though. Carly and I just sat down and booked a hotel for the next three nights. We chose the Royal Terrace Hotel and it was slightly pricier than we were used to. But let me tell you, best decision we ever made. It was so nice! We were definitely not their usual clientele. They were more used to the rich business man with his wife rather than two college students with huge backpacks. But our room was so nice and the beds were so comfy. I could have laid there forever!  See, in this case the bad actually brought something better.

 

4. Carly gets food poisoning. Enough said. Details aren’t really necessary.

5. This may have been the straw. We had only been able to plan for a day and a half in Dublin, Ireland. So Thursday we were supposed to leave Edinburgh at 5:00. We arrive at the airport and they nonchalantly tell us that it has been delayed two hours. Great… fine… we could handle that. The airport had a nice selection of restaurants and we could entertain ourselves. We weren’t overjoyed but we could deal. However, the plane actually gets delayed over SIX hours. And of course we arrived early for our international flight, so we were in that airport for more than NINE hours. The airline did give us a whole four pounds to buy food, because that will make up for missing our evening in Dublin. I honestly thought that the flight was never going to come. It did eventually come and we hardcore did Dublin in a day. The trip turned out fine. It was just a slight bummer.

 

As you can see, our trip was no where near perfect and I can honestly say that I was excited to return to our home in Paderno. I had a great time anyway, though. It did teach me that rough stuff happens and there is nothing I can do about it. We just had to let in go and enjoy our trip. I also learned that I can handle a lot and I feel like I was a big girl this week.

Ciao!