A tale of woe

I arrived forty-five minutes late for my seminar in London on Thursday because every stinking tube line in London was either experiencing signal failures, closed platforms, unexpected delays or 'incidents' - it took me two hours to make the trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf when the London transport board route planner said it should take twenty-nine minutes. You might think this would be enough bad travel karma for one week. You would be wrong.

I think yesterday we wrote the book on how not to do your bank holiday weekend. For example, don't book everything at the last minute on a busy week when you're going to be exhausted at the end of it. Don't have one cocktail too many out with co-workers the night before. Don't pack at the last possible second. Don't rush into work the morning you leave to fire off an important document you forgot to send the day before. Don't accept a rental car with visible damage to the hubcaps which suggests someone has already hit a few bumps in it. Don't get lost in the suburbs of Bristol because you're trying to take a 'scenic route'. Don't bother making a sidetrip to Glastonbury when the main point of your trip is hiking in Exmoor. (Even if you have unwashed hippie hair and find yourself among your own kind when you get there.) Don't assume that just because a North American car can handle the odd bump in the road that the tiny tonka-toy tires on European tin cans (ours was about the size of our new dishwasher and almost couldn't fit our suitcase in the back seat - there was no trunk) will be similarly resilient. Don't go off and explore a ruined abbey if it means you'll come back to a flat tire - though you almost couldn't tell because there's only two inches of rubber before you hit rim even when inflated. Don't wait until this point to discover that there is no spare tire (where would you even put one?) and only a tube of glue for patching punctures. Don't bother holding onto ANY hope at this point, because the aluminum-foil wheel rim will inevitably be bent precluding any repairs but a replacement wheel. And said wheel or a replacement rental car aren't going to happen at 4:00 pm on a bank holiday Saturday in a country where everything closes on Sunday.

We were forced to abandon our entire vacation, two and a half hours from our destination, because of a flat tire. Not even the roadside assistance guys, when they finally arrived, could handle the situation. It's so ridiculous that even now I want to scream. Last night, as we sat in the tow truck on the way back to Oxford (our only available option) the driver kept reminding us how he was supposed to be on his way home. Yeah, cry me a river, you're getting paid overtime and we've lost our one-night deposit on the B & B, the cost of a rental car for the weekend, whatever they'll hit us with in damage, and our entire vacation. I didn't even get to climb the damned Glastonbury Tor after all that. Or get my turn at driving.

We were so dejected we couldn't even talk the whole way home. It was an awful night. Today the weather is beautiful and we're aching to be out hiking on the moors, as we were supposed to be. So we coped with our depression in ways appropriate to our respective genders. Jeff bought a new gadget (an even cooler mobile phone) and I bought shoes. The magnitude of the crisis required two pairs. I may need to add another if I still don't feel better tomorrow. Send chocolate.