England in Brief

Well it is my tradition, when I get the opportunity to travel outside the U.S. to do a great big series of posts that catalog my various adventures (and gets my post count up closer to Sandlin’s). Unfortunately, Not a whole lot of interest happened while I was over there. Mostly work, so splitting it up by day would be disingenuous. So here, then, rather quickly, is my week in england.

Sunday
I met up with a guy that I work with at the airport. We’ll call him C. We both showed up at the same time but while I generally prefer to put everything in a backpack and just carry it on, he had some actual luggage, so I stood in line with him and we dropped off his stuff. The first leg of our flight took us from Austin to Chicago, and we had several hours of layover there. We got some lunch and then walked around the terminal, both to burn time and because Work is having a charity event (as it does every year) where if you strap on a pedometer and get 70,000 steps in a week, they will donate some money to a charity of your choice.

Well as we were sitting there, we got called up to the front desk. It turns out they had overbooked the flight and so because we had paid so close to full price for our ticket, we got bumped up to business class. Nice! That’s definitely the leg you want it on, too. Flying east is the worst. We got on the plane and spent about half an hour just cataloging all the cool things in our area. We had video on demand, a lengthy dinner service, free alcohol and our chairs folded down completely flat and nearly horizontal. Great for sleeping.











Check out our seats!

So we had appetizers, salad, main course, and dessert. I even had some courvoisier because I’d never had it before. It’s a type of cognac. Strong, as it turns out. After dinner (and finishing off my first book) I stretched out on my luxurious business class seat and caught a few hours of sleep. Much better than regular seats. I skipped breakfast because they were going to serve it 2.5 hours after dinner, and I wanted sleep more than I wanted food.

Finally we landed, on Monday, and took a car from Manchester, where we landed, to Harrogate, where we would be doing our work. We took a car service up from the airport, which is nice because I got some spare Z’s on the ride up. After that, we checked into our Hotel, dropped off our stuff, and went right into work.

The first day of work after an international flight is, as you might imagine, pretty rough. We mostly just managed to get some paperwork taken care of, check out some basic stuff, and then call it a day. We had dinner at a place called Betty’s and kept ourselves awake by walking around the town. We discovered a place that was having a local ale festival and so I got to try Three 1/3 pint glasses of several different types. My favorite way to drink beer.

Finally, sleep caught up with us at around 6 or so, and we made plans to wake up early the next day.