Mind the gap

As predicted, Saturday's been a quiet day with a light load, leaving us plenty of time to rest up and get ready for the non-stop flurry of activity that's about to start.

About all we did was a visit to the National Railway Museum. It's a very nice museum and you can't beat the entry price (free!). It's a huge space, or rather several huge spaces, converted from old rail garages and roundabouts and such, crammed full of trains, scores of them. It would probably have been breathtakingly cool if I hadn't just been to the Smithsonian museums a half-year ago. I think I may be a little bit transportation-and-technology-museumed out. In any case, it's not fair to judge any museum by a comparison to the Air and Space Museum, but NRM really does surprisingly well even judged in that harsh light. I was just a little too tired to really revel in it.

We were thinking of making one more outing to do some clothes shopping, but so tired were we that we ended up just heading back, with a stop at Red Chilli again for lunch -- with enough leftovers for dinner, too.

This leaves us plenty of time for pre-packing and flat-cleaning, which is good because we have an early start tomorrow. We have a one-hour train ride, and the wedding reception starts at 1:30pm; so logically, we have to get up around 7:30am and be out of the flat by 9am, so we can be early to arrive at the train station for a trip that lets us arrive even earlier at the hotel. So we can be hurried and have time pressure in the morning. So I have to do my best to pre-pack today so we have very little to do in the morning -- which is challenging, and makes everything a lot more work, due to the number of things that are needed until the last morning.

Making things more complex, we also have to bring our wedding outfits along and be prepared to get changed after arrival. No way I can get into a tuxedo first thing in the morning and wear it for hours and on the train before we even arrive. So I need to pack for the flight out, but also be prepared for no less than three changes of clothes and two showers to happen in between the packing and the flight.

The flight... don't remind me about the flight. Thankfully we don't have a train ride the morning of the flight, since we have an overnight at a motel at the airport. But then we have two and a half hours checking in, followed by a seven and a half hour flight. At least that one won't be the overnight flight -- because it's impossible to sleep on those. Hopefully it'll be a lot less uncomfortable to do it during the day (by the body clock) than overnight. After that, we have a seven hour layover at JFK. On the upside, that gives us absolutely no worries about the amount of time we'll spend going through customs and re-checking-in. On the downside... that's a bloody long layover. I hope we can find some comfortable seating near a power outlet. It'll be like making base camp. We should have brought a tent. (Imagine the way airport security would react to that.)

In between, of course, there'll be the wedding. I've been rehearsing my best man speech. I wrote it out, but I won't be reciting it: writing it is just a way to affix it in my mind, but I'll be able to improvise it from the outline and from my many runthroughs. Siobhan's got a lot more to cover, and has to do it from a script, but I don't think she has to memorize it; she'll be able to read along as she goes. That none of this will have been rehearsed as a group makes me worried: it's a production involving a lot of people, and no one's even tested out the cues. Guess that's not my problem though; I've done all my best-man duties.

All of these things in the coming days are why you probably won't be hearing more from me until I'm safely recovered back in Vermont. Instead, after this post appears, my blog will go back to scheduling publication of posts I wrote two weeks ago or so. I don't even remember what they'll be about. Hopefully they'll be more interesting than this rambling travelogue has been!