The longest day of my life

I mentioned in my last post that Michael and I just got back from a trip to Europe. However I had not blogged very much in the weeks leading up to the trip, either. This was due to my mad rush to finish several big assignments before the trip — we had only decided to take the trip about a month beforehand, so I already had quite a bit of work scheduled for March.

I did get everything done in time, but just barely, and it contributed to what was officially the longest day of my life. In order to finish my work on a large client project, I worked through the night Wednesday night, finishing the project a bare 25 minutes before we were supposed to leave. We were leaving early Thursday morning, so I figuered I could sleep on the plane (two separate flights), and then be on about the right schedule when we arrived in London Friday morning.

It didn't work out that way. Surprisingly (since I can normally sleep almost anywhere) I was not able to sleep much on the plane, so when we arrived in London I had had only about two and a half hours of sleep over the last 30 hours.

And unfortunately, we still had a lot of traveling left to do: Our destination was Haworth, home of my favorite classic authors, the Brontë sisters. This meant taking the Heathrow Express into London from the airport, the Tube to King's Cross, another train to Leeds, connecting to a train that would take us to Keighley (pronounced "Keithley"), and taking a taxi from Keighley to Haworth.

By the time we got into Haworth around lunchtime, I was dead on my feet. Still, I was momentarily revived by excitement, so we decided to eat lunch. Big mistake! I ate less than half of my delicious Yorkshire pudding, I was so tired. When I went to bed directly after lunch, I had been going almost nonstop for 48 hours.

Our trip was heaven for me, from a writer's standpoint as well as for the value of the international travel itself. While I'm adjusting to being back and catching up from being gone for 10 days, I'll be blogging a little more about my experiences overseas.