Half Term Travels

mtnweekly.com

So after about three days in "sunny" England, I decided that was just about enough of that and it was time to start looking for a more temperate climate.  Luckily, Scott's school was letting out for half term during the second week of February, so I didn't have to wait long.  The only problem was that there are so many awesome places to visit so nearby, we didn't know how to narrow it down!  Scott graciously let me have the honors of finding the ideal location, so the first thing I did was sign up for as many discount travel sites as possible.  This only served to magnify the conundrum, as I was now receiving almost hourly updates on the new *amazing* deals to some exotic location, but only if I bought the tickets right now!  So, I did the most logical thing in this situation: I randomly clicked on a link to see where it would take me.

This particular link took me a to a deal with for a week in Portugal.  I didn't know much of Portugal and never really had too much of an interest to learn more, but the price was good (and the weather was forecast to be pretty nice), so I asked Scott what he thought about going.  To my surprise, he was very enthusiastic; apparently, he had always wanted to go to there!  So, I booked the deal and got to daydreaming about the nice, warm weather.

www.dipity.com

Because we got the tickets for such a good price, they departure flight was from a different airport than the return flight.  The return flight came in to Gatwick, one of the two major London airports, so I wasn't too worried about finding transportation from there.  The outgoing flight, however, left from "Luton Airport," which neither Scott nor I had ever heard of.  Luckily, we found a company that runs shuttles from Cambridge to all the London area airports.  At £15 per person for the ride, I thought the fare was a bit steep, but Scott told me that the U.K. is known for having expensive transportation because it is not run or subsidized by the government as it is most countries.  This has been somewhat of an adjustment from me, coming from Chile where I could travel halfway across the country for $30, moving to the U.K. where that money might get me as far as London (if I can find a discount fare).

Our flight to Lisbon was schedule to leave Luton at 7:40 on Monday morning., so to avoid the hassle of getting lost and possibly missing the infrequent early morning buses from our house, we booked a room at the airport hotel.  The website said it was only a ten minute walk away from the terminals, so we could get some extra sleep and just head over by foot in the morning.  Theoretically, this was a good plan.  We relaxed and got some household chores done on Sunday, and went into Cambridge around 5:00 to catch the shuttle.  We found the bus stop easily enough, but had some trouble finding the right bus to get on.  We tried to ask one of the bus drivers, but she looked confused and told us "that bus doesn't usually leave from here," and suggested we go to the main terminal.  We were fairly certain that our tickets were for the stop that we were at, so we went to look at the route map just to make sure.  Sure enough, Luton was on the list.  We figured that maybe the driver was new to this route or something, so we went to ask another driver.

He too gave us an odd look and told us that we should probably go to the other terminal.  Confused, we pulled out the electronic text message we had received as out ticket and showed it to him.  After wading through the garbled mess that occurs when you use a standard phone to receive smartphone messages, he finally found the actual message, and a light bulb went on in his head.  "Oh," he said, "you're going to Luton!" Scott and I looked at each other, befuddled--isn't that what we'd been saying all along?!  We expressed this to the driver, who told us that we had been asking for London!  Apparently, Luton should be pronounced with a long "u" sound, whereas we had been using a short "u" sound.  This, combined with our highly exotic American accents, produced some confusion. 

smh.com.au

With the help of the second driver, we eventually figured things out.  He helped us decipher the text message tickets and told us that we had actually purchased a later trip, scheduled to leave at 8:30 p.m.  It was only just 6:00 at the time, and we really weren't looking forward to waiting outside in the cold for another two and a half hours.  Luckily, the driver was very accommodating, and agreed to let us on to his earlier shuttle.  We were especially grateful for his generosity when we looked out the window ten minutes later and saw that it had begun to snow significantly!  By the time we got near the airport about an hour later, there was a good couple inches of snow on the ground.  Turns out, a ten minute walk seems significantly longer when you're wearing "breathable" sneakers.  It also didn't help that we started out on the other side of the road and walked halfway to the hotel before we realized we wouldn't be able to cross the street and had to backtrack back to the airport again.

But we finally made it to the hotel and got checked it.   We were very grateful for the fact that each room had its own heater, and took full advantage.  We settled into the room, got out of our wet clothes, and just huddled up next to the heater for a while.  Eventually, hunger won out so we went to the lobby restaurant to grab a quick dinner.  Scott had an authentic English pie and I had some (probably also English) fish.  We also shared some cider (yes, we're lightweights and can only handle one pint between the two of us).  We then headed up to our room to get some rest and hope that the snow would let up before our flight the next morning.