I usually have a crisis about every two months. The lifestyle I've adapted is pretty consistent in two ways: 1) I have the time of my life traveling all over and 2) I have an existential crisis and nervous breakdown on a fairly regular basis.
The most recent one is my least favorite to date, but I may just be saying that because it's so fresh in my memory. This fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants thing I do either serves me really well or really... not well.
This time I it got me stranded in the U.K., alone and at night, with only a handful of personal possessions. Shall I go into detail? Ok, I thought so.
I just took a 10 day vacation in Europe. To fly home I needed to get from Amsterdam to London to catch my international flight back to the states. You can fly a lot of places in Europe for pretty cheap, and there are tons of little airlines that I had never heard of because I’d never flown between countries that were so close together. That’s not a thing in America.
Anyway, I was supposed to go to
the major airport in London but it was much cheaper to fly to one of the
surrounding ones and take a 45 minute bus ride to Heathrow to catch my plane.
It was also much cheaper to fly into London 10 hours before my international
flight, and unfortunately, spend the night in the terminal.
Most the time I'm up for a little more work or headache to save money, and that allows me to afford to do more of the things I want, so I wasn't overly stressed about the long travel agenda. Until it went horribly wrong.
I landed at a small airport outside of London and made my
way through brain-jarring construction in every hallway to claim my suitcase
and catch the bus to London Heathrow. A kind gentlemen saw me looking around for some Sherlock
Holmes clue that would tell me where to go and told me exactly which bus
I’d need to catch. The one that would take me to the train station that would then take me to the airport. Sounds
easy, yeah?
Well I dozed off on the bus. It was after midnight at this point.
When the bus driver called my stop I woke up with a start and fumbled my way to
the front with bags hanging off me every which way.
“How do I get to the underground?” I asked him, to which he
replied,
“Erm, not sure.”
Alright, so I was groggy and probably lost, but I can usually find my
way around really well so I gingerly stepped off the bus, thanked the driver
and started looking at street signs to try and figure out where I was. I had
spent days exploring central London earlier in the week, and I had no idea where I was at that point. Sandwiched between a major freeway and a shopping mall, I
couldn’t see any signs of where to hop on the underground train or even find
out what part of the city I was in.
I walked up the concrete steps decorated with graffiti to find
a kind lady waiting by the road. She, like the gentleman at the bus bay, and
many others who come across me, could see the “Where am I and where should I
go?” look on my face. So she asked if I needed help.
The lovely Irish woman told me, “Oh the underground is miles
from ‘ere, chicken. But lucky, loads of buses come in at the shopping center
there and just ask someone, they’ll tell ya how to get there! Oh, God bless ya!" And she hugged me and sent me on my way.
I was a little more than worried at this point. I
was cold and tired and didn’t want to pay bus fare again because I was running
out of British currency. Getting lost is usually fine by me, but I don’t like being
lost and feeling helpless, especially
in the middle of the night.
And this is when I realized that in my grogginess I had left my suitcase in the
compartment under the bus that left moments ago. WHAT! I was freaking out. For a good thirty seconds
I let myself feel panicked, and whine, “Noooooo, no, no, no, no” over and over again. My Irish friend had left and I was alone in a strange place, needing to get somewhere but not sure how, knowing that even if I figured out how to get there, I couldn't very well leave without recovering my luggage.
The wait was long but the bus finally came. I think the man driving that second bus was an actual
angel. He called dispatch and found out who was running the bus right before
him. Then, he called the driver and arranged to meet up with him. He let me on
his bus without fare.
I sat there thanking him until I became annoying because I
could actually see light at the end of the tunnel. I had imagined losing my
luggage, traveling by bus and train all night to find my way to the airport,
and then arriving disheveled and without my clothes, shoes, souvenirs,
everything. Horrible to think about when you’re in a foreign country and you’ve
got $30 worth of local currency on your person. I was lucky.
So the angel bus driver met up with the first one and flagged him down from the opposite side of the street. My savior gets out, runs across the street dodging traffic,
unloads my suitcase from the first bus, runs
across the street again with my broken, one-handled suitcase rolling along
behind him, loads it into his bus, and takes me another 15 minutes to a stop where I can not only catch a train, but I can catch a train that will take
me directly to Heathrow airport without having to make any transfers. Phew! I
told you, an actual angel.
So at this point I was breathing much easier, actual crisis had been narrowly averted, and I even looked forward to sleeping upright with a craned neck in a chair at the airport.
I won’t tell you about the first train tunnel I went into that was
definitely a place where homeless people slept and not a subway station. I also
won’t tell you how, after a 40 minute train ride I came upon the airport to
find the check-in stations were all closed (really, at 3 a.m.? Strange.) and I slept in
a waiting center outside security with some homeless drunk vagrants who were
actually very sweet and gave me their bench to sleep on. Because that would
really freak my parents out.
But all in all, I made it to the airport with my all my bags, I
got on my flight without a hitch, and I was able to come back to America as
opposed to being stranded in a foreign country. Yay! I ended up just fine, but I can’t forget the feeling of
panic outside of the shopping mall, and how long that 20 minute wait really felt like.
Viva la vida! *exasperated sigh*
-Alison
