London Calling!

Boy oh boy I seem to have left the ol’ blog a bit lonely lately and for that I apologize. Rest assured, I am alive and I am, indeed, still an Idiot Broad Abroad.

I have been embroiled in life and death, state of emergency, high-profile, international peace keeping and development exploits.

And by this I mean I have been busy having way too much fun in Europe… whoops.

I’ll give an update of what I have been up to since my last post!

Stockholm World Water Week Conference

I spent 8 days in Stockholm and worked as an Assistant for World Water Week.

Working as an Assistant involved standing around in a little blue vest inside of a dark and stuffy sporting arena and smiling for half the day and then removing said vest and getting to frolic about the conference for free! Also included was free food, drink, and many social events.

It was an inspiring and fun week where I met other young professionals and students from all over the world!

Return of the Human Sized Box…

The last hurdle from shifting entirely to completion of my solo cycling trip was to transport my bike (inside human sized box) from Stockholm to London – to then take to Grimsby to store in Tom’s garage.

The challenge of carrying human sized box increased on this leg of its journey, because I added about half of my luggage into the box along with some bubble wrap to pad the bike.

I set out from my hostel early last Saturday and alternated between carrying, pausing to rest, and dragging human sized box to the station.

Luckily, central station was not too far and I made it relatively unscathed. And there was no trouble getting on the airport express with human sized box!

Again, no trouble checking in at the airport as I had registered my bike as special baggage. I dropped it off at the designated spot and crossed my fingers that it would be in Heathrow when I arrived.

Fast forward to Heathrow…

I followed the indications to the special baggage pickup area. I saw a similar human sized box, but not mine, and knew I must be in the right spot. I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more.

Eventually I asked someone to check things out. According to their system my baggage had come out at Conveyer 3, even though that made no sense since it was too large to fit through the door. Anyways, according to the computer it was there. I walked to the other side of the baggage area.

No human sized box. Surprise, surprise.

I walked to the lost baggage counter and was confronted with the scene below.

This poor mother at the counter had been waiting for baggage off the same flight as me – two car seats – and her children were going absolutely mental. I wish I had gotten a picture of their little chocolate streaked, strung-out faces. They were like hyenas on crack cocaine. I simultaneously felt horrible for the women and could not contain internal laughter.

Anyway, I couldn’t handle waiting in this mess so I decided to head back top the special baggage area just to double check and lo-and-behold I saw my big beautiful beaten human sized box!

I threw it on a trolley and got the hell out of there.

Tom came to pick me up and we spent a fair deal of time debating whether or not to unpack human sized box or try to fit it inside his car.

Please, no jokes about Tom’s Micra – he has a complex about it’s size.

I went to Grimsby and I live to tell my story

Tom’s hometown is Grimsby. It is perhaps not the most posh of places in the English countryside. I have heard endless stories from Tom and it was finally my time to put everything into context with a visit myself!

We arrived on Saturday evening and immediately went to the Chippy. We had fish and chips the size of a small infant for dinner.

On Sunday I untaped human sized box and it’s contents exploded out onto the floor of Tom’s garage. I reassembled my bike and we went for a ride around town and through a nearby natural park. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn on my GPS or Strava.

To give a sense of the rough side of Grimsby, Tom insisted that we did not wear our helmets as we rode our bikes out of town. The probability of being heckled, threatened or “taken off your bike,” was high if we had our helmets done up with our nice road bikes.

I couldn’t decide which would be worse at that moment: being mugged at knife point on my bike by a Grimsby thug or getting a brain injury.

In the end, we carefully rode out of town with our helmets hanging off our handlebars until we could put them on in the safe zone. This didn’t stop a group of lads yelling at us from their car window when we were stopped at a light.

A Tom portion of Sunday Tea.

They call the three meals of the day: Breakfast, Dinner, and Tea. Crazy, I know.

A reunion in London!

I took the train into London early on Monday morning to meet Zoë who is in town for a wedding and then for our hiking trip in Scotland!

It was so much fun to spend a day and a half running around London with Zo and eating and drinking all the good things (thanks to Zoë’s skilled research and none of my own).

The best night ever

I bought tickets months ago for an event that I attended last night in London: Ricky Gervais and Richard Dawkins in Conversation!

Ricky received the 2019 Dawkins Award.

I got The Selfish Gene signed by Dawkins after the show.

It was an inspiring, enlightening, hilarious, and highly enjoyable evening! There was conversation about making science accessible and open to all people. Through his Foundation, Dawkins has translated his work into countless languages and made it freely accessible – including in the 13 countries where being an atheist is punishable by death.

Mind the Gap

I am in London for another two days and then I head up to Edinburgh to reconvene with Zo and Nicole where we will begin our grand adventure in Scotland!

I will try to be more active with the updates. There is surely going to be a lot of idiotic things happening with the three of us traipsing through the Scottish highlands.

DOTD

Spotted: a Winnie in London!