How to Have a “Christmas Adventure!”™

How to Have a “Christmas Adventure!”™
A Step-by-Step, Easy to Follow Guide to “Adventure”
(Guaranteed tears and frustration, or your money back!)

Are you one of those people who spend Christmas bored at home in front of hours upon hours of the same Christmas movies and programs you have watched since you were in utero? Or perhaps you spend every Christmas at grandma’s house, with your hand up the backside of a turkey? Enough of those boring, routine Christmases! It’s time for a “Christmas Adventure! “™

Just follow these four preparatory steps (and then thirty more “Travel” steps) and you will be having your very own “Christmas Adventure!” ™

All you need for this “Christmas Adventure!” ™ is the following:

• a large suitcase packed to the brim with clothing and heavy presents
• your passports and money in the currency of your destination
• mobile phone
• plenty of anticipation and excitement
• **a flight to an exotic destination on the busiest travel day of the year – Christmas Eve
• gracious and expectant hosts awaiting your arrival in the exotic destination

**Note: ensure that your E-mail confirmation of this flight is printed off, and most importantly, that it tells you to go to the wrong terminal. This is key. Without this crucial error, your trip will run smoothly and then how will you be able to call your vacation an “adventure” ™?

Once you have gathered the above, you are ready for:

Pre-travel preparation

1) Buy cheap flight tickets online. This ensures that there is no human involved in the process who might double-check to ensure your flight information is correct.

2) Trust that the information you have received from the online travel agency is correct.

3) Make reasonable, yet inconvenient requests to your gracious hosts, such as “we are vegetarian, although we eat some fish, please don’t cook meat for us”, and “we are highly allergic to your pet of choice”. Perhaps you have two broken legs and require wheelchair access to their stair-only building, or you have joined a cult which requires you to sing “You are My Sunshine, My only Sunshine” every morning at the break of dawn.

4) Ensure that you have chosen hosts who will go out of their way to bend to your inconvenient requests and plan weeks ahead for a seafood extravaganza Christmas dinner and put their cat hair-ridden guest bed in storage, change the curtains, vacuum every corner of the house, and buy a new futon mattress for you to sleep on.

Finished? Allright! Now we can move onto the exciting part:

Travelling

1) Wake up at an ungodly hour on Christmas Eve morning (say, 4:50am) so that you can do some last-minute carry-on packing, eat a good breakfast, have a shower, and put on make-up before you leave for the airport. Push your partner out of bed 15 minutes before you need to leave, as he is not “a morning person”.

2) Get onto public transport (say, the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground system) and actually get a seat because it’s so early.

3) En route, ensure that an extremely smelly person sits next to you. For example, an unfortunate homeless man who has obviously not bathed in weeks and who is carrying a plastic grocery bag with foul-smelling leftovers of a turkey dinner from a charitable shelter or someone’s trash. Get him to open this bag and eat the rotting bird while you feel, all at once, sympathy for the homeless man, anger at the government for not providing enough social assistance, and utter and complete nausea. But don’t move, because that’s rude. For best results, ask him to join your journey early on, so you can really savour your nausea.

4) Get off at the terminal indicated on your E-mail confirmation. This is crucial. Even though you notice on the “Which Terminal should I go to?” sign that your destination city is not mentioned, recall that sometimes flights are routed from unexpected terminals due to high volume. Trust that if you end up at the wrong terminal, that the staff will assist you in getting to the correct terminal.

5) Arrive outside of the terminal, and wonder why there are large tents full of people, and a huge line-up at the door. Figure out that they are all people whose flights have been cancelled due to fog – they are being asked to wait outside in the cold so that the terminal does not get too crowded.

6) Finally make it to the door, only to have the staff member checking people’s flights tell you that you are at the wrong terminal. Make sure he is unable to tell you how to get to the correct terminal.

7) Make sure it will take you a long time to get from the incorrect terminal to the correct terminal. For instance, you could make it so all but one elevator in the terminal have been closed down and are guarded by security. Also, you could make sure that even when you get the train to the appropriate terminal, the walk from the train to the actual terminal building is exceptionally far. If you are really in for “adventure” ™, you can try and have it so that the signs in the correct terminal are unclear and lead you to the domestic check-in rather than international desks.

8) Finally find the self-check-in kiosks of your airline. By this time, you should be frustrated and really relieved to have found the kiosks. You should have approximately 30 minutes before your flight departs. This way, when you check-in, the kiosk computer will inform you that check-in for your flight has timed out and that you should seek assistance from a member of staff.

9) At this point, you will not realize how bad the situation is. Instead, your heart will fill with hope that once you find a member of staff, they will be helpful and do whatever they can to help you get onto your flight.

10) If you have followed the “Pre-travel Preparations” correctly, you will be flying on the busiest day of the year and there will be no members of staff visible amongst the crowds. As a strategy to attract the attention of a concerned member of staff, rush around frantically and look upset. Surely they are on the lookout for flustered travelers to help. When you do find a member of staff, look at them with the puppiest of puppy-dog eyes you can muster, and speak only between exaggerated pants so that they can see you have been frantically rushing around. Mention that it is not your fault that you are too late to check-in.

11) The member of staff will be surly and unhelpful. They will tell you there is nothing you can do except re-book your flight. They will tell you to join a line for the ticket desk and point in the general direction of the ticket desk.

12) It is important at this point that you fill your heart with hope that the ticketing agent will still be able to get you on the flight (after all, it’s not your fault!) This is in order to heighten your sense of disappointment (and “adventure!” ™ later on.

13) Join the queue. Make sure you mistakenly join the “Executive and Business Class” queue and are kicked out by the security guard, who takes one look at your get-up and concludes that you could not possibly have afforded Business Class tickets. He will point you to the line for economy class.

14) Look at the line and feel your heart plummet and squash as it hits the bottom of your stomach. If you have properly “filled your heart with hope” as outlined in Step 12, you should actually feel the moment of impact.

15) Walk towards the end of the queue. Keep walking… keep walking. Realize that after the first corner, there is still a line-up of people. Begin to panic – there is no way you will make this flight.

16) Turn the next corner and wail “Oh no!” and cover your mouth in surprise. Keep walking… keep walking.

17) Turn the third corner and feel your face scrunch up as you begin to cry. There is no way you are getting on a plane today. In fact, the whole trip looks like it might be off. Think of the money you have spent on the tickets, of the holidays you have booked off of work, of your gracious hosts who have vacuumed and cleaned for days, and who have spent a good deal of time and money preparing for your arrival. Hold the hand of your patient and calm partner who will tell you that everything will be allright. Keep walking… keep walking.

18) Walk to the “arrivals” area of the next terminal. This is where the line ends. You will be crying nice and hard by now, your face red and flushed. There are a few others in the line who are crying, but most look at you with disgust. (“Look at the rest of us, we’ve been here for hours already”, their looks of disgust say.) Your partner’s look says he is concerned for your mental health. He will insist that everything will be okay and that you should both join the line.

19) Get out your mobile phone and call your hosts who will be leaving soon to pick you up from the airport. For some extra “adventure” ™ points, make sure to mis-dial, then phone home and wake up your groggy flatmate and ask him to find the correct phone number and country code. Ask him to call your gracious hosts and explain the situation. He will sound like crap and will not quite understand you because it’s still only 7:30 on Christmas Eve.

20) Text your best friend to tell her what has happened. Get a sympathetic text back – she is heading home from her boyfriend’s house to volunteer at a shelter for men like the one you encountered on the tube. Feel guilty that you are upset for missing your flight to an exotic locale when there are others who cannot afford to eat and your friends are spending their holidays volunteering their time to help them. Then, find out that everyone surrounding you is in the line because their flights have been cancelled, and feel even more guilty.

21) Realize now that if you wait all day and into the evening in this queue, you may not make it home by the last train or get a flight the next day, which means you could be stuck at the airport for the 24th, 25th and not be able to leave until the 26th, as all public transport shuts down on the 25th. Stop feeling guilty and resume feeling sorry for yourself.

22) Wait for 3 hours or so, slowly shuffling forward in the line and accepting the chocolate treats, water bottles and sandwiches the airline company is providing. Clearly, it is going to be a long wait.

23) Get a call from your best friend who says she is still on the train, but can buy a ticket online from home once she gets there. A light bulb should go off in your brain at this point, because there are internet kiosks at the airport – you can buy a new ticket! If your heart properly plummeted into the pit of your stomach, as outlined in Step 14, you will now feel it fluttering just above your belly button, and the hope which gushed out of your heart as it hit rock-bottom will now enter it again, but this time in small, anticipatory drips from your bloodstream…

24) Send your ever-patient and calm partner to the internet kiosk while you wait in the line. While he is gone, a representative from the airline will arrive at your section of the queue. He will carry a megaphone and announce to everyone that there are no flights left at all for the 24th or 25th. He will urge all residents of your country (country, not city!) to go home and call the airline company from the comfort of your home. He will make definitive announcements such as, “You will not make it to your destination in time for Christmas!”

25) The line will break-up, and your partner will still not have come back. Just as you begin to panic (the once-orderly line is turning into a chaotic crowd – how will you find one another?) you spot your partner’s head amongst the frustrated travelers.

26) Push your way back into the terminal and run to the closest internet kiosk. There will be others who have had the same idea as you had, so keep your elbows out and be prepared to fight for a computer.

27) Using another internet travel agency, find a flight leaving on Boxing Day, and pay three times as much as your original flight ticket. For another bonus “adventure™ point”, buy an indirect route to and from your destination, tripling your travel time.

28) Go home defeated for the day, but relieved that you have salvaged (you hope!) your vacation somewhat.

29) Rush to the grocery stores before they close for Christmas, and instead of the meal your gracious hosts have prepared for you:

eat a pre-prepared, frozen pizza.

30) On Boxing Day, arrive four hours early for your flight - being sure to have triple-checked the departure terminal and having packed so you have only carry-on luggage. You have had enough “adventure” ™ for one holiday, now you can sit back and enjoy an entirely smooth vacation!