Portland Redux - Part 1

August 31, 2007

Misadventures in travels continues. The alarm went off at 4:55. Shower. Finish packing. Call taxi company at 5:30. Breakfast. Taxi arrives a bit later than expected at 5:42 or 5:43 outside their 5-10 minute estimate. Arrival at National Express station at 5:47 by my watch. There’s a coach leaving – no obvious destination sign. Mine should leave at 5:50. There’s another coach waiting but it’s not the right one. I pay the cab driver and go talk to the driver on the other coach. The coach driver thinks I missed my coach, and the taxi is leaving. Uh oh. I ponder my options. Taking the next coach sounds too risky – it would not get to Heathrow bus station until 9:45, and without a taxi ready I would not be able to catch up with the coach at Trumpington. I call the taxi company again. Hmm. There’s another taxi dropping off someone else so I hang up (but I would have to call the same company again in order to use this taxi – ugh).

Train station at 6. I have to ask the attendant about price difference between taking the Heathrow Express and the Underground one-way and return, and he wonders why I did not know how I would want to get to Heathrow until that moment. Okay so I did not do this perfectly but that doesn’t mean I’m a complete idiot. As the attendant waited for credit card approval for my one-way (single) trip via underground, I replied that I was going to take the coach but that the coach drove off as my taxi got to the station. He turned slightly more sympathetic and asked if I had already bought the ticket for the coach. I replied that return ticket is still good (right?). Of course all this could have been avoided if I called the taxi company 5-10 minutes before I actually did. I boarded 6:15 to Kings Cross.

Arrival at Heathrow at 8:25 or approximately 50 minutes earlier than if I had caught the coach on time. Heathrow is a mess – terminal 3 right now is undergoing renovation so it’s even worse than usual. Check-in took longer than expected, but I was still managed to get past all the security points by 9:05 or before the scheduled time for my coach’s arrival. The gate was not going to be open for a while – the departure time for my plane is 10:50. The only things I lost were money and possibly sleep.

Because of some other airplane having to make an emergency landing (this sounds familiar, no?), the takeoff was delayed by over an hour. Thus at 1:20 PM (still in the same time zone) or almost 8 hours after leaving my house, I was merely flying over Ireland with well over 3200 miles to Washington D.C. and another 2300+ miles to Portland. The only good thing is that I had nearly 3 1/2 hours of layover in Washington so an one-hour delay likely will not cause a problem. A factoid of interest only to me – going from London to Portland via D.C., I am supposed to have a total flight time of 13 hours 57 minutes (8 h 29 m + 5 h 28 m) while the return journey via San Francisco needs only 11 hours 54 minutes (1 h 45 m + 10 h 9 m). Gotta love the jetstream. The layover in San Francisco is under 1 1/2 hours too.

Arguably the most annoying issue is with boredom. My old iPod battery is down to <40% capacity with over 12 hours of journey left to go. The in-flight entertainment option for movies were so poor that I chose to watch a TV program – House M.D. first followed by a sitcom I had never seen before. During the next cycle, I picked Shrek the Third – it was horrendously bad – much worse than the first two Shrek movies. The remaining options are The Hoax (starring Richard Gere), The Last Mimzy (starring Rainn Wilson), Premonition (starring Sandra Bullock), Hot Fuzz (starring Simon Pegg), Next (starring Nicolas Cage), Blind Dating (starring Chris Pine), and the Disney Channel. This has to be by far the worst set of airline movie choices I have ever seen. The eastbound planes has at least 3 movies that sounds more interesting (in no particular order Spider-Man 3, Blades of Glory (Will Ferrell figure skating comedy) and Waitress (Keri Russell drama). Next up for a diversion is a British comedy Hot Fuzz. If all else fails, there’s always the book – The Girl At The Lion D’Or (Sebastian Faulks).

By the way, I’m bothering to write all this because I’m figuring that the day will end with Salsa dancing.

I rarely fall asleep while watching movies – at a theatre or at home. It has happened twice before. The first movie was The Player, which was directed by Robert Altman (he also directed M*A*S*H and Nashville among other movies). The second movie was Bob Roberts starring Tim Robbins, who was also one of main actors in The Player. Both movies are comedy – a satire with subtle humor rather than a slapstick or raunchy obvious comedy. I think I fell asleep to Bob Roberts twice. Or was it The Player? Hot Fuzz now joins that short list. I am not saying that it was a terrible movie. It was probably the least annoying movie I watched today, but it was also the only one I fell asleep to. The third movie was Blind Dating – it was a complete crapshoot. This one was occasionally engaging but ultimately turned out to be quite bad at many levels. I can’t decide which one between Blind Dating and Shrek The Third was worse as far as the scriptwriting was concerned. Combination of bad food and bad entertainment with a slight queasy feeling induced by a brief encounter with air turbulence made me feel very welcome about disembarking the plane at Washington Dulles Airport (as well as dreading another 5+ hours in the air).

To be continued.