BRIGHTON, England — Tired and groggy from the sleepless nine-hour flight, we made our way through the eerily quiet London Gatwick airport to retrieve our luggage. After standing at the wrong luggage carousel for 15 minutes or so, we finally found the right one and snagged our bags. Of course, I was the only one who brought two bags — so, everyone had claimed their luggage by the time my second bag came circling around. My biggest fear when traveling is my luggage getting lost — especially on an international flight.
Once we had our luggage, we had to catch a train to Brighton Station. Our instructor, Andy Coughlan, bought our tickets and told us our train departed from platform four — or so he thought. Standing at platform four with our bags in hand, it became clear that our train was not departing from there, but instead platform seven. With only five minutes to get there, we hurried to get back up the stairs and across the way to platform seven.
However, I had two 40-pound bags with me and taking the stairs wasn’t an option. I looked around for a lift (elevator in America) and rolled my bags towards it — only stopping to ask an attendant for directions to platform seven. He looked at me and waved his finger around in the air as if he was practicing casting a spell.
Finally, I made my way to the correct platform with a minute to spare and loaded my bags onto the train. 30 minutes later we arrived at Brighton station and hailed taxis to take us to our Airbnb house. It was placed beautifully on the English Channel, and my room had a view of the seafoam green huts that lined the pebble beach.
Rooms claimed, and in desperate need of a nap, we soldiered on so as to not get jet lag. This meant that I had an additional 12-hour day stacked on top of the 12 hours I had already been awake. Initially, the adrenaline rush of being in a foreign country was enough to keep me up and running, but soon ran out — leaving me and the rest of the group in a zombie like trance. In fact, if I passed our group on the street, I would have thought that we were strung out on drugs.
For our first meal, we ate at The Cricketers, a historic pub in the The Lanes. The pub was decorated floor to ceiling with vintage cricket gear, and had minimal lighting — which was easy on the eye. I had a crusty baguette with fresh cod fish fingers, and a Strongbow cloudy apple cider — it was scrumptious, and just the pick-me-up I needed to get to our next adventure, Brighton Palace Pier.
Stay tuned for more on the Brighton Palace Pier.