London/Dublin Day 9: St. James's Gate to Short Pump in 37 Hours (Part 2)

UPDATE: Visitors from Off Wing, click here. Thanks for visiting!

With my hotel located all of three minutes from Gatwick’s South Terminal, I could have slept in on Sunday morning before my noon flight back to the States, and started to readjust my body clock to Eastern Standard Time. Unfortunately, I was fully awake by 7:45 — or 2:45 AM EST. Whoops. So I showered, completed repacking, loaded my red Rover, and decided to do a little bit of controlled-environment cruising down the two-lane road behind my hotel, which ran parallel to the west side of the Gatwick perimeter fence. After about fifteen minutes of the game of “Chicken” the English call rural driving (old bus skills served me well again, using the passenger-side mirror to keep that side’s tires just barely on the blacktop’s edge), my desire for adventure was sated, and I pointed the car back toward LGW.

• Point 1: The road approach to Gatwick South Terminal sucks almost as much as the road approach to Heathrow. The train station is the primary means of access for good reason.
• Point 2: If you follow the signs to the Europcar rental-car dropoff, but you wind up in a small, ugly parking lot almost nestled underneath the terminal access-road bridge with very few signs, you’re actually right where you need to be.
• Point 3: Parking an RHD car between two other cars, particularly in a typically-narrow English parking space, is scary.
• Point 4: If you, as an American, ask the rental-company attendants if you can just leave the car at the end of the lane and not try to turn into a parking space, your accent will betray your national origin to them. Given that knowledge, they’d much rather let you do so (and park the car themselves) than fill out the paperwork involved when yet another bloody Yank clips the corners of two other vehicles trying to park. For once, being perceived as a stupid American is to your advantage; use it.

Car dumped, I made my way to the American Airlines desk, where I used my newly-acquired Gold frequent flyer status to blow past the 60 people in the coach line and step into the business- and first-class check-in line. After a short Orange Terror Alert interrogation, I got boarding passes, checked my bag while most other passengers were still in line (MAJOR tactical error — read on), did the metal-detector routine, and returned to Gatwick Mall for McDonald’s and an hour or so of vegetating before proceeding to the gate.

The daily round-trip flight pair between London Gatwick and Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina is the last remaining vestige of American’s late-’80s/early-’90s hub at RDU. The idea was to leverage this Southern location to challenge Piedmont/USAir in Charlotte and Delta in Atlanta, and thus AA for a time ran service of up to 294 flights per day through RDU, including London and Paris-Orly non-stops. But it didn’t really work, and American backed off in 1996 in favor of Miami (which could also serve as a Latin American gateway). The Gatwick flight remained, though, and AA appears to do pretty well with it (coach was nearly sold out two months in advance, business class was packed as well, and other same-day LGW-to-U.S. flights were not close to that at the time). The college sports fan in me could tell that many of the travelers were flying direct rather than connecting on — the profusion of UNC, NC State and Duke gear briefly turned that Gatwick gate into ACC country.

AA 174 departed about ten minutes late, and I was stuck in seat 32F of that particular Boeing 777. That’s a non-aisle seat in the middle section; the only redeeming factor is that it was on American Airlines’s “More Room Throughout Coach” service, so I had three to four inches more legroom than US Airways subjected me to last time. Onboard, I broke into my book haul from the previous night, so in case Amazon happens to be calling your name, here are some thoughts…

• Football Against The Enemy, by Simon Kuper, is an examination of soccer’s position in world culture. Kuper toured the globe during 1993 and 1994, interviewing players, management, local citizens, government officials — pretty much anyone who had an interest in the game off the field as well as on. It might not be too exciting to you if you’re neither a soccer fan nor a political wonk, though.
• Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, on the other hand, was a real hit. American moviegoers might be familiar with High Fidelity and About A Boy, which are adaptations of his novels, but this was his first major success. The book is an autobiographical story, told through a series of game reports, of his growing up as a suburban fan of north London’s Arsenal FC (football club). The detailed soccer tidbits might be lost on non-fans, but that aside, much of the content applies to sports fandom in general, and it was very easy for me to see parallels to my own life. The odd nonexistence of a game you won’t be able to see (the 2003 Insight Bowl still doesn’t quite seem real to me, despite Matt’s excellent game report here at BTN)? Adopting a second team in college years (the R-Braves took a backseat to the Salem Avalanche for a while)? Living vicariously through your team during a bad time in your personal life (FALL 1999!)? Been there, done that.

That combination got me most of the way through the 8 hour, 35 minute flight, leaving only about an hour of blankly staring at the Skymap before the 3:45 PM EST (8:45 PM GMT) landing. Raleigh’s immigration/customs area is tiny, so I asked the flight attendant if we’d be okay to make my 4:45 RDU-DCA flight, since it was the last direct flight of the day to Washington. “Sure, no problem,” she replied.

Five minutes after we got off the plane, DCA passengers were called to the front of the immigration line, as we needed to get moving toward our plane. So much for “no problem.” With immigration through, I proceeded to the pre-Customs luggage pickup — and waited. 4:15 came and went with no luck, but at 4:29, one minute before my self-imposed deadline to cut and run for the 4:45 plane, my bag appeared (first passenger to check in, first bag to be stuffed into the plane, last bag to come off it, I guess). With a fast pass through Customs and the TSA, I ran for gate C17 as my name echoed through the Terminal C paging system. At 4:35, I collapsed into seat 9A on AA 4585, an Embraer Regional Jet (note to American Eagle: contoured seat backs with side bolsters on those narrow seats are extremely painful to customers who are not 5’9”/150) from RDU to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Conveniently, that flight overflew Richmond (through the clear sky, I could look out my window and see the highway interchange behind which my apartment is located) before releasing us at DCA just before 6 PM. With that landing, connection 6 of 9 was down; I treated my very confused stomach to California Pizza Kitchen before hopping number 7, the Metro two stops down to King Street, and walking through the tunnel to Alexandria’s Amtrak station next door.

The end was in sight now, so I located a Mountain Dew to keep myself awake on the train, made a couple of calls to let people know I was back in the States, and restlessly wandered between the indoors wooden benches (almost church-pew style) and the trackside concrete pad. Amtrak 87, a train that originated in New York and probably dumped most of its passengers at Washington’s Union Station, arrived only 10 minutes late at 7:25 and offered by far the most comfortable seats of the day — especially since the last two cars of the train were virtually empty. I broke out the iPod, lifted the armrest to spread out across two seats, and fiddled with the iBook a while before getting frustrated with the window-side AC outlets that were too loose to hold the “wall-wart” style adapter in the outlet. We were back to Staples Mill by 9:25; the sketchiest taxi of my entire vacation brought me back to Short Pump by 9:45, where I had just enough energy to lock up, turn the cable modem and wireless router back on, turn the heat back up, and let the iBook download almost a week’s worth of e-mail (since the previous Tuesday night at the Burlington) before my eyes fell shut. The prospect of going to work the next morning was not encouraging.

OK, this got a lot longer than I thought. I suppose a 29-hour day should be expected to be pretty long, though. Parting thoughts and scoreboard will appear sometime soon — hope you’ve enjoyed the trip!