Gatwick, the other London airport

I thought that flying directly from Atlanta to Gatwick was a fabulous idea. Don't let anyone tell you Gatwick is in London the way Heathrow is in London. Gatwick is out in the middle of nowhere. I didn't discover this until I explained to Linda, my cousin with whom I had reserved a free bed that I would be arriving in London via Gatwick.

I started researching options for traveling from Gatwick to my cousin's house. A cab from Gatwick was way out of my budget. Linda suggested I take the Gatwick Express train to Victoria and then ride the tube or take a cab from Victoria to her house. It started sounding rather complicated but I 'm talented at denial or is that optimism?

In an effort to rationalize why it was good I was flying into Gatwick, I decided Gatwick would be faster to get through than than the sprawling Heathrow. After all it's smaller and out in the suburbs, right? The last time I'd been through Heathrow, it had seemed to take forever and that was before the 9/11 travesty occurred.

Well, Gatwick is smaller and Gatwick is out there. But getting through security checkpoint and customs at Gatwick took over two hours and even though it was October it was a blistering 90 degrees F in the airport.

We foreigners were told to queue up one way and then another airport representative came and had us reshape our queue so I ended up losing my spot. The Gatwick personnel didn't seem to understand the unwritten rules regarding line or queue breakers.

There were hundreds of us and the line wasn't moving for over an hour. They had us queued up in Texas cattle corral formation and when the line finally began moving, I spotted the infamous 60something Atlanta trio and thereafter every 100 feet or so that we we inched along I met them again. We weren't the only people fanning ourselves. It was unbearably hot there. I was ploughing through Gatwick with a huge peice of brand new luggage from Proffits (or was it Macy's?) that was jam packed with as much clothing as I could stuff into it plus my carry-on, my laptop computer and my purse. Being a packrat ensures an automatic talent for getting more things into compartments than other less evolved humans. My point is that I was carrying a huge load. Did I mention I was insane enough to be wearing new shoes and had a sprained ankle?

After paying £14 for a train ticket for the privelege of a ride to Victoria station, I had originally planned to take the tube to my cousin's house but I had been traveling for well over 12 hours and was exhausted and took a cab. The cabbie had trouble understanding American even though all I was trying to translate from American to real English was my cousin's address.

It was four hours after I was expected that Linda finally opened the door to my knocking. I had never been so glad to see a relative in all my life. Funny thing about it is that we hadn't seen each other in 26 years since our grandfather's funeral. Linda is a year younger than me. When we were growing up in the 60's and 70's, her family would visit ours every summer. Her mother is my father's younger sister. Linda's sister Donna is a year older than I am. All those summers the three of us spent together must have counted for something because as Linda welcomed me into her home, the years fell away and our relationship fell into the comfortable realm it always had, affectionate and humorous.

Linda told me she had begun to worry about me. She tried my mobile phone but I never heard it go off which is very usual for me. I explained the problems I encountered at Gatwick.

Even though it was October, London was warmer than Atlanta was when I left. I was wearing autumn attire and all I wanted was to take a shower and fall into a bed for an hour or two nap.

That's my cousin Linda and her son Daniel at the top. I was trying to figure out how to get the picture somewhere down here but I'm too lazy to worry about it. Just remembering the Gatwick experience, I'm forced to admit that fatigue has conquered my intention of working on my belated travel diary and so I'm going to bed.