London/Dublin Day 0/1: This Day Has 43 Hours (Part 1)

With this entry I’ll begin my London/Dublin series, wherein I hit some of the highlights and lowlights of my most recent European adventure in more-or-less chronological order. I’ll occasionally branch off into mostly-unrelated tangents that crossed my mind on the trip, such as cars, book reviews, and Canadian identity crises. But admit it, you come here for that kind of weird stuff anyway, so I suggest you just sit back and enjoy it. Unless you come for the football, in which case this almost completely football-less saga is not for you. ;-)

After a long Christmas night of packing and collecting a folder of important documents that would be forgotten in the morning rush (like, say, my family’s itineraries and my collection of maps for the rental-car drive), I woke up Friday, 26 December at about 0730 EST for a long day of travel. I have trouble sleeping on planes anyway, and for trans-Atlantic jaunts, between the anticipation, the heavily-processed air and the necessarily out-of-sync mealtimes, the dream of sleeping my way across the Atlantic remains just that. So 24 + (24 - 5 hours for GMT adjustment) is 43 hours without sleep. Fun times.

My sister had to make one stop in McLean and get to Dulles (IAD) by 1300 to help with pre-departure administrivia. So for my 1528 departure from Reagan National (DCA), she picked me up at 0900, as I scrambled to take out the trash, secure the apartment, adjust the thermostat down, and otherwise prepare to leave for 10 days. Forgot to stop mail delivery? I’d just have to bring a trash bag to catch the overflow when I unlocked the box ten days later.

We got out of Richmond by 0915 and made great time up I-95, reaching my drop-off at Franconia-Springfield Metro at 1045. So, with just under five hours to kill before I caught the domestic leg of my trip, I made an executive decision: I’d stop at DCA to check my rollable bag, then head for the Washington Auto Show. American Airlines check-in was painless, and with my largest bag left in their capable hands, I caught the next Yellow Line train inbound.

”The next stop is Mount Vernon Square/Seventh Street/Convention Center. This is the terminal stop for this train — you must exit at this stop.” With that, I dropped $10 and killed a couple hours making the following observations: - The new Volkswagen Phaeton sure looks nice, but for $80K, I think I’d take four mid-range Jettas instead, or perhaps a couple of high-end Passats and a Golf. - Legroom in the Mini Cooper isn’t bad at all — certainly no worse than my Jetta TDI. - The new Prius isn’t quite so good in that department, but it still beats a Hyundai or a Ford Focus. - The Scion xA is not quite as ugly in person as it looks in publicity photos — it still ain’t anywhere approaching pretty, though. - Knowing that my brother would kill me if I didn’t do so, I got several pictures of some odd-looking concept Jeeps. - The Odd Fact of the Year (New Car Division) definitely goes to the new Pontiac GTO’s heritage. For being such an American icon, it might surprise some folks to learn that it’s actually built in Australia by Holden, GM’s Aussie brand. The new GTO is actually just a left-hand drive conversion of the Holden Monaro CV8, with a Pontiac front end slammed on and the fuel tank moved to meet North American rear-impact crash test standards. But even crazier than a GTO being Australian is the possibility that another Holden vehicle, the Ute, could get a Chevy bow-tie and come over as — get this — a new-gen El Camino.

At 2:00, it was time to get back on the train and return to DCA for the non-descript AA 1865, a McDonnell-Douglas MD-80 departing DCA 1528 EST and arriving Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) 1755 CST (1855 EST). The big discovery of this flight was that my new Sony noise-cancelling headphones really did work, cutting the plane’s ambient noise considerably. The only interesting occurrences were on landing, when I first heard a toddler screaming, then a shorter and sharper noise: some passenger brought her chihuahua on the flight, nestled in her jacket pocket. I still have yet to decide which was more obnoxious, the screaming kid or the yapping rat-dog.

At DFW, I had about an hour and fifteen minutes to negotiate the terminals and make my connection to AA 78, departing DFW 1910 CST (0110+1day GMT) and arriving London Gatwick (LGW) 0950+1 GMT (0450+1 EST/0350+1 CST). Meanwhile, I was not inclined to to wait for the in-flight dinner service, which with a departure of 8:10 PM EST probably wouldn’t show up until after 9 PM Josh’s Stomach Standard Time. So, after catching the abomination known as the TrAAin to move myself the length of a terminal and a half, I located gate A19, and promptly lucked into Dickey’s Barbecue Pit, which not only served good Texas barbecue, but also provided sweet tea in abundance — which isn’t always guaranteed in Texas (for sweet-tea purposes, neither Texas nor Virginia are really part of the South).

At the gate, I found that my flightmates on this segment of the adventure would include about 40 high school-age cheerleaders and associated chaperone-types; apparently a select cheering squad from Missouri was participating in London’s New Year’s Day parade. You can imagine my… er… delight at this discovery. Fortunately, they surprised me by being pretty calm, other than the one entirely understandable cheer when the pilot greeted their group by name before departure — we Hokies did the same thing when a Southwest MCO-FLL pilot welcomed the 20-some of us connecting from a delayed ORF-MCO flight the night before VT@Miami 2002.

On the 8 hour, 40 minute flight in the Pacific-configuration Boeing 777, the biggest highlights were a Rockapella performance on the CBS in-flight channel and the DC power jack beneath my seat that I used to watch most of Sneakers on my iBook. Aside from that, it was pretty much just a boring, absurdly-long flight, although I did manage to wipe out Bill Bryson’s excellent book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, the story of the development of English over the past millennium. I had read another book on the topic, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English: The Biography of A Language off a Chicago Boyz tip in November. Although I enjoyed that one, it was a bit academic — the author is a university professor. Bryson’s advantage is simple: he’s a writer, and writes for people to read rather than to explain his own knowledge and let readers glean what they will.

Next up: arrival at Gatwick, compacting my 6’4” self into a train-appropriate size, and a really odd museum.