Pioneers! O [soggy] Pioneers!

I am en route to Russia, currently sitting in a McDonald's in Manchester, UK on a layover.

I left yesterday at 7:48 in the morning from the train station in Ann Arbor. Knowing that I would have long layovers, I deliberately packed my carry-on as lightly as I could. I took just my laptop, an umbrella, a neck pillow, some comfort items like a toothbrush, a spare shirt to change into, my brand new fancy water bottle, and for reading, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Plus my purse, which holds my camera, wallet, passport, and mp3 player. I thought I had packed pretty well.

After a 4-hour train ride, I arrived in Chicago. It was rainy and blustery, and I still had to transfer to a CTA train that would take me to O'Hare Airport. While dragging my unwieldy checked luggage plus my two carry-ons a few blocks to the subway, apparently something in my bag jarred and knocked the cap off my fancy new water bottle. In the rain, I didn't notice until I was already on the CTA train to O'Hare, when all of my carry-on was already soaking wet. I had to wait until I got to O'Hare to dry things out under the hand dryer in an airport bathroom.

My laptop survived and is working marvelously. My change of shirt is wet and wrinkly and basically useless to me now. And worst of all, my Leaves of Grass got wet. Now its leaves are warped, brittle, and stuck together. Heart of Darkness managed to escape the worst of it.

Apart from the water bottle malfunction, getting to O'Hare and on my plane was no trouble. The flight was delayed on the runway for over an hour for no better reason than the flights before it were delayed, but I slept and hardly noticed. Dinner and breakfast on the plane were both delicious.

My flight arrived in Manchester at 8 a.m. (that's 3 a.m. back in Michigan). I took a train from Manchester airport into town and have been wandering around all morning during my layover. The city is beautiful, although chilly and indecisively rainy, so now I'm wet again. I already figured out how to navigate and from which direction to expect traffic when crossing streets.


I had planned on eating lunch at some authentic English pub, but McDonald's is the first place I saw with free wifi, so I went for it. It feels good to rest up and do a some people-watching from such a busy, open place. I spent a little time trying to decipher the local version of English. This is my interpretation of a phone call I overheard just now:

"Hello?
...
jabber jabber jabber jabber wut jabber wut jabber jabber
Okay, love, bye bye bye."

If I were here longer, perhaps I'd teach these silly English folk how to speak English the proper way...

What?

Anyway, my flight for Helsinki leaves at 5:50, so I still have time for more exploration before heading back to the airport. Time to move on.