Canterbury Tales

Sorry, couldn't resist the obvious title.

This weekend brought a nice long break for us students: Thursday was a national holiday celebrating some saint (please do not ask me to remember which one) and, simultaneously, father's day. Thus, no classes. And for whatever marvelous reason, we did not have classes on Monday either, giving us all a 5-day break. Woot! So I took this opportunity to fly up to England and visit my friend Sam (we went to middle and high school together, he now goes to ISU) in Canterbury, where he is studying for the semester.

I have to say that it is a testament to our friendship that I made the trek to Canterbury to visit him. Not only did this trip require a flight to London, but once at the airport I had to hop on a train to the train station, then from there take an 1 1/2 hour train ride to Canterbury. Exhausting.

The weekend gave me the chance to recover though. Apart from seeing the Canterbury Cathedral, we spent the majority of the time relaxing and simply seeing a bit of the city. On Sunday, Sam, myself, and his friend Jessica (also an ISU student studying there) decided to take the bus to Whitstable, a little town on the coast. Now normally this would have been a 20-30 minute bus ride, but because it was Sunday, there was only one bus that had to go to every bus stop in England, thereby making the trip last over an hour. Once there, we walked along the beach, ate some traditional English food (and some ice cream...) and generally lazied around. It was when we decided to catch the bus home that things got interesting. We got to the bus stop about 10 minutes before the Sunday bus was scheduled to come. As we are sitting there waiting, this bus drives by us without stopping. We didn't think too much about it until this English couple came up all distressed that the bus had driven by without stopping...and it was then that we realized that it had been the bus we needed and that the next bus would not come for another hour. When we finally got the next bus (and all of us with full bladders, though we could not find any open public bathrooms, darn Europe), it ended up being the longest, bumpiest ride in the history of the world. We literally crawled off the bus over an hour later, all of us with headaches and feeling rather sick. The other passengers did not appear to be faring any better.

Yet despite the worst bus ride of any of our lives, I had quite a nice time in Canterbury. It was great getting to catch up with Sam and just spend a weekend relaxing and not worrying about a schedule or homework or anything else.

Momma and Daddy countdown: 9 days!!!!!!!!!! =)