And They Are Off

Semester at Sea. in their packing recommendations, advises that you pack your suitcase and then take about half of it out.  We just put stuff out on a designated spot for at least a week and adjusted it daily.  A few days ago, we started weighing our bags to stay under the 50 lbs limit.  We already knew that we would take an extra bag and incur a $50 charge because I had some late books for the ship, and Nancy wanted to take a lot of watercolor supplies.

In the final adjustment, the bag with books was going to be overweight, so we juggled some art supplies into my bag with a trade for some sweater, fleece, etc. light bulky things. We each wore our heaviest items, and all three bags ended up at about 48 lbs. We were set with a carry-on each (my backpack) of some things that we might need on the trip and would want if a bag went missing. As you can guess, laptops are heavy and ended up on the carry-one.

After a weekend of furious winding up things, ie. a thorough cleaning of the house for Meg, our house and barn-sitter, we were ready to leave on Monday on little sleep. Our flight was from Richmond to Boston to Dublin to Gatwick in London.  This was not an ideal schedule with the changes, but it saved us about $500 and let us get away in the afternoon on Monday with an overnight to Dublin.

I'll just say we spent a lot of time sitting in airports, but except for the crappy, (ie. non-existent) wifi in Boston, everything went mostly smoothly.

As befits us, we used CheapO Air for booking our flights, and there was not a problem.  We only had a slight delay leaving Dublin on AerLingus, and our bags were just coming onto the carousel when we reached Gatwick. 

 A couple of things about flying and airports.  I hadn't flown since 2010, and it has gotten a lot easier where you just insert the credit card you used to book your flight and it checks you in. Everyone we dealt with was very friendly and competent.  Airports are great places for people watching. We played the  "I wonder if they are going on Semester at Sea" game.

Nancy spent some time practicing sketching and I watched stuff out the window.  I also got very far into "The Book Thief", finally.

 I'm glad that wasn't my bag.

Flying does offer some scenery not otherwise available.

Semester at Sea is good at providing possibilities for getting to the Port from the Airport, and they gave possibilities for Heathrow and Gatwick. Hiring a car or a cab was the easiest and fastest way, but the cost was considerably more, so we tried the other suggestion--taking a bus.  The National Express picks you up at the airport and delivered us a few blocks from our hotel at a reasonable cost.  The bonus was some great scenery along the way.

I could seriously spend a day just puttering around Chichester and Portsmouth

 

We finally got Southhampton after a 4 hour bus ride, but it was nice to see the countryside.  Needless to say, we crashed when we got to our hotel--almost exactly 24 hours after we left home.  After a stroll and dinner (fish and chips, of course), we are crashing again to rest up for a day of London tomorrow.

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