the ski trip that wasn't, part one: murphy's law in action

As I wrote previously, I had a ski trip to Oslo, Norway scheduled for the past few days. As it turns out, we didn't actually go. So here's what happened.

We were scheduled to fly out of Stansted on Ryanair at 6:30 am Sunday, but getting to the airport was a bit of a hassle. We took a minibus from Egham to London in the middle of the night, and from there were supposed to hop a coach from Liverpool Street Station to Stansted. But our minibus driver got lost so we were driving around the dark streets of London in circles for absolute ages. When we finally got to the station we had missed our scheduled coach, so we had to take a later one (which didn't even leave on time), and by the time we got to the airport we had about a half hour before our flight left. But because it was Ryanair, check-in was an absolute nightmare and not everyone got their boarding passes. Even for those of us that did get our passes, by the time we cleared security and bolted across the airport, we had missed our flight. So we had to walk all the way back through security and get in this huge queue to try to buy new tickets...which turned out to be £200 at the cheapest.

By this time, we were exhausted from running across the airport, sleep deprived since we had stayed up all night, and bummed about missing our trip. We sat in Costa for a while, eating breakfast and trying to figure out what to do. Half of our group decided to go straight back to Egham, while seven of us figured that we'd stay in London for the day. One of the girls has an aunt that owns a hotel in Sussex Gardens, so she got us a reduced rate there and we decided to stay the night since we had our bags already packed and all. So we dropped our stuff off, then had a child-like regression therapy day in Piccadilly Circus: Burgers and milkshakes at Ed's Diner, hugging giant teddy bears at Hamley's toy shop, and a night at the Trocadero Centre arcade. Then we went back to the hotel, ate chocolate, listened to music, and planned what to do next.

Stay tuned for part two...