First Piece Final

Catching the 6:45
I breathe harder and harder as I run down the avenue clutching my well-worn leather band, straps held together by copious amounts of packaging tape and curse myself for procrastinating as much as I do. This needed to change and what better time than study abroad to do it.
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. We were understandably pumped. Spain wouldn’t be able to handle this. 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 A.M. and therefore I would have to arrive at this Luton airport at around 5:00 A.M. or at least 5:45 A.M. I may be many things, but one of them is certainly not an early morning person. 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 other 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 A.M. and be ready to leave for the airport so at about 1:00 that morning. I would simply lie about and listen to Sam Cooke with my flat mates while drinking wine but then I decided that maybe I should look and find out precisely 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 if there is a God, then sometimes he does look out for me. I quickly discovered that Luton was bloody 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 elated that at least I was just going for a long weekend instead of a long trip. I discovered 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”. I flew down the street, running side by side with the double-decker for about a block and barely making it on.
I rode the bus for about a half hour, filled with a strange calm that registered oddly with me even at the time and praying that my neurotic fear of a double-decker tipping over as it takes a corner too fast would not occur tonight. 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. I stop and turn with a horrified look to see the bus drive nodding in what seems to be a peculiarly maniacal fashion and speed off. I 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, launch past (and slightly over) a family with two small children 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.