Draft of Personal Essay

Catching the 6:45
Flying by oneself for the very first time can be a daunting experience for anyone but when you can make the situation: flying by yourself for the first time and it is in a foreign country and in the middle of the night, the magnitude expands drastically. Sure, I had flown without my parents before but it had always been for school trips or with friends, never me simply getting on an airplane and jetting away. I had been fine on the seemingly interminable transatlantic flight that took me from Detroit to London but I was not as apprehensive as perhaps I should have been regarding the numerous smaller trips that I was planning to take.
My friend Rachel and I had been discussing a trip to Barcelona for a while and we decided to finally go the weekend before Halloween. Rachel, who was studying in Milan, would meet me at the airport and we managed to find two flights that would arrive within fifteen minutes of each other and we were understandably pumped. Spain wouldn’t be able to handle this. Firstly, however, before I could even make it to Spain, I had to make it to the airport.
Looking for flights from London to Barcelona on the internet, I decided to set a few criteria which I would work by: I would find the cheapest flight that I could and I would try to stay with EasyJet which I had always heard great things about. I soon found a roundtrip flight for 27 pounds, which was a fantastic deal. However, there was one drawback which was that take-off was at 6:45 and therefore I would have to arrive at this Luton airport at around 5:00 or at least 5:45. I may be many things but one of them is certainly not an early morning person and my consternation was ample but supplanted by the fact that I would be going to Barcelona and it was costing me very little. Now where exactly was Luton Airport? It says ‘London Luton Airport’ so it obviously must be in London but London is a gigantic city and it could be on the side of town. I decided that maybe a half hour or forty minutes before the time that I wanted to arrive at the airport would be an appropriate time to leave. Big mistake.
I had decided to just stay up the whole night because I knew that there was no way that I would be able to wake up at 4:00 and be ready to leave for the airport so at about 1:00 that morning, I decided that maybe I should look and find out exactly where Luton airport was exactly. This was a miraculous compulsion for reasons that will become evident soon and its sheer existence serves as proof that is there is a God, then sometimes he does look out for me. I quickly discovered that Luton was actually nearly two hours away from my flat and actually was in an eponymous town that could scarcely be called a “suburb” of London. My horror was further heightened as I realized that this gave me only about twenty minutes to pack before I needed to run my procrastinating scrawny self out the door and to the airport before I missed my flight.
I threw myself into packing as quickly as I could, throwing clothes and toiletries into my bag and feeling ecstatic that at least I was just going for a long weekend instead of a long trip. I discovered that to my ever-increasing horror that I needed to take a special train to Luton and that I could only get it from a certain Blackfriars station which sounded as if it were the last place in the world that I would want to be at 3:30 in the morning. Also, if I was to catch this train in time to make my flight, I needed to get the nightbus that would be arriving at the nearest stop in three minutes or else I would have to wait nearly an hour and would have no chance of catching my flight. I proceeded to hurry as fast as I possibly could out of my flat though not before seeing one of my kitchenmates from K, Georgia, arriving home for the night and drunkenly mumbling something at me that I could not understand but took as her wishing me “Godspeed” and as I flew down the street, running side by side with the double-decker for about a block and barely making it on.
I ride the bus for about a half four, filled with a strange calm that registered oddly with me even at the time. I proceeded to get off the bus when I heard “Blackfriars” announced over the loud speaker but soon find out that I have mistakenly exited at the bridge that apparently shares a name with the train station and begin to sprint as fast as I can across this bridge in the middle of the night, seeing as I only have minutes to make the train. I arrive at the station and find out that my credit card will not work in the machine but finally manage to make a debit card work. The train has now arrived and I essentially leap over the barricades and throw myself onto the train. The remainder of my journey to the airport happily transpired without any incident but as I arrived at the main Barcelona airport and called my friend Rachel to ask where she was, I quickly found out that she landed at the smaller airport that was an hour and a half away from the city and the cycle began anew. One would think that I would have learned something about procrastination from all of this but, hey, hindsight and success make it seem less stressful than before and it makes it all much more exciting.