June 3: London to Salty Way Surf Camp Colares, Portugal
/The night before I left London, the girls and I had drinks in the bar as we waited for the rest of our laundry to finish. Steph did mine for me because she knew I was in a rush and didn't plan on seeing more of London. Thank you Steph!
Everybody was leaving at 5 am so I decided to leave at the time too and just chill in the airport for 6 hours because I really didn't want to be there anymore. Remember I said those few days in London just had a weird energy? Keep this in mind.
I walked from the hostel to the train to take the train back to Stansted to fly from Standsted to Lisbon and then take another train to Sintra and then get picked up by the surf camp.
Cheap flights people, cheap flight.
As usual, Ryan Air doesn't post their gate until 20-40 minutes before their flight so even though I was at the airport 6 HOURS early. I had to run to the other side of the airport AGAIN and by the time I got there the line was around the corner.
I had the same backpack with me that I brought onto the other plane and easily placed under my seat and they wanted me to check it at the gate.
Um, heck no! Because it has my passport and all my electronics in it.
I told the gate agent, "this fit under the seat 3 days ago just let me try to fit it under again and if the flight attendant wants me to check it I will."
Her response, "don't tell me how to do my job."
...BURST INTO FLAMES...
I said nothing and tried to just power walk passed the luggage checkers but they caught me.
We got into an argument and after 15 minutes of back and forth I remember that my new DSLR backpack (that I purchased because my wonderful friend Shiggy sent me a video of Garret from the Bucket List Family talking about his travel camera bag) has a separate compartment that you can just pull out and take with you.
So as the guy was still yelling at me, I took my backpack off, pulled out the DSLR compartment, pulled out my laptop, iPad, passport, and a few other things and carried all of them with me ONTO THE PLANE.
Now you can check it.
Then I get on the plane AND THERE WAS PLENTY OF ROOM FOR MORE BAGS.
Look, my issue isn't that they may have had to check my bag if there was no more room. My issue is that both people were rude about it and would not even listen to me.
Whatever, you get what you pay for with Ryan Air sometimes.
Including dirty aisles.
Couldn't bother to run a little dust buster through here?
The rest of the flight was fine though. The flight attendants were really nice and I listened to a ton of podcasts.
Oh one more thing, bring a water bottle with you on your Ryan Air flight. They will try to charge you 3 euros for the tiniest bottle of water you have ever seen in your life.
After that madness, I arrived safely in Lisbon and took the shuttle into the city. I met some guys my age from Hong Kong and Belgium who were in Lisbon for a surf trip and we started chatting about surfing in Portugal and a girl my age from California who just finished walking the El Camino. Pretty rad. The guys then walked with me to find the train station and there was a train to Sintra right as I got there. Sa-weet!
I was supposed to text the camp when I was on the train but I didn't have time to connect to Internet before the train left and I honestly was too nervous to start practicing Portuguese. I got to Sintra, went to a cafe by the station, and asked the owner of the cafe to text them for me. She was wonderful.
I waited for an hour and a half but just wrote in my journal and ate some food.
Then Romi and Mateo, the two helpers at the camp, came to get me. We stopped at the supermarket so I could grab some things to cook and then got to the house.
Since I woke up at 5 AM and it was now almost 9 PM, I was exhausted. I met a few people, had some dinner, tried to sociable, and went to bed early in another 6 bedroom mixed dorm.
As I fell asleep I thought, "Please don't have bed bugs."