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Published: October 21st 2009
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The Beginning
All packed up and ready to go. 9:45 PM
At 4.00AM this morning I awoke to the sound of some tuneless noise thumping a repetitive beat somewhere nearby. I opened my right eye and turned towards my clock radio, confirming that it was, most definitely, 4.00 in the morning and that my clock radio was working, even if it wasn’t producing the kind of music normal human beings listen to. The left eye, at first, failed to open, joining the rest of my body in wondering why the hell I had set my alarm to get me up at this stupid hour, a time surely reserved only for vampires, werewolves and milkmen. Eventually my mind brought the rest of the body up to speed; I had a plane to catch. Not wanting to get up particularly early in the morning on the first day of our holiday, I had cleverly booked an 11.30 flight, which was, after all, nearly dinner time. Whether it was because I don’t fly very often, or because I was having a moment of stupidity when I booked the flights, I failed to take into account the ‘check in three hours before’ rule on international flights as well as the time it takes to drive to Gatwick Airport (which, as a London airport, I expected to be closer than it actually was to London).
Once my mind and body was accustomed to the situation, I was surprisingly awake given the time of day, and jumped straight into the shower. Clearly not fully awake, however, it took me until I had nearly finished to notice that I was sharing my shower with a slug, who was enjoying soaking up the damp on the edge of the bath. Being in a pretty good mood at this point, I left the slug to enjoy a free roam of the bathroom on the condition that he was gone by the time I returned home. By 4.48 I was washed, shaved, dressed and ready to leave the house, but because we had arranged to meet at 5.30, I sat down and had a cup of tea instead.
Having not particularly planned how to get to Gatwick, it was left with my brother, Chris, to drive us down there, having generously offered to take the day off work and drop us 170 miles from home before driving straight back again, for no personal benefit other than a few sweets that we bought him for the journey (by ‘generously offered’, of course, I mean I asked him and he was too nice to tell me to bugger off). Living in an area where leaving my car unattended for an hour or so usually ends with me buying new tyres or making some form of insurance claim, I arranged to drop my car at my mom’s for a couple of weeks, picking John up along the way and meeting Chris there. In an unusual bout of timeliness, Lyndsey was also ready and waiting, so the four of us were on the road by 5.30, prepared for a 3 hour journey of endless motorway and tuneless music. As the sun began to rise, the tuneless music began to fade, replaced by hysterical DJ’s, Lionel Richie and Duran Duran. The predicted traffic, particularly on London’s M25, failed to materialise, and by 8.30 we were unloading our bags at Gatwick Airport and waving Chris off to enjoy another three hour journey of endless motorways and potentially tuneless music.
From here, it was just a matter of hanging around the airport, drinking tea and looking around overpriced shops until we were called up to the 11.30 flight. The plane left the airport more or less as scheduled, and we were on our way to Iceland.
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