Home for the Holidays

Instead of marauding across Europe as was the original plan for winter break, I decided I needed some time back home in Duluth. In an attempt to keep this a secret so I could surprise my friends, I swore those who knew I was coming home to secrecy, and then... I talked about it on facebook. Oops. But lets be honest, I was never going to be able to keep that one a secret. Or keep any secret for that matter. So with a group full of informed people waiting for me at home, I pulled an all nighter on the 22nd of December and embarked on a 12 hour trip home.

I decided that it would be a really good idea not to sleep the night before because I had a taxi coming at five A.M. and... that was it. There was really no logic to that decision. But that's what I did, and luckily I had a very nice ride to Birmingham with an extremely talkative, friendly cab driver to keep me awake. The first leg of my journey home went smoothly, with no issues other than the fact that I can't sit still for an hour, let alone nine. I did, however, hit a few snags on my two hour layover in Newark Airport. First of all, customs took wayyyyy to long, and I knew that I still needed to get my bag, re-check it, go through security, and find my gate. To my immense surprise, re-checking my bag turned out to be really easy. It was the next part that sucked. One of the super helpful airport people sent me to terminal C, where I finally decided I should check a board, and saw that, oops, my flight was actually leaving from terminal A! This little mistake meant that I had to go through security to get back onto a tram, get to terminal A, and then go through security again in order to get to my gate in the 30 minutes I had before my flight was scheduled to leave. I only just made that flight home. Fun fact for readers: I got asked three times if I was old enough to travel alone. Three.

As soon as I was actually back in Minnesota I knew I had made the right choice by going home for break. I just felt like I was home. For Christmas I ended up staying in the cities with my mom, and had a really great Christmas Eve party with family, where I got to see people who were not at all surprised by my presence. It was nice. My time in the cities was limited, however, and soon after Christmas I headed back to Duluth for time with friends, family, crappy Chinese food (YUM), and about 27 Starbucks runs. It was almost like I had never left.

I ended my trip home by going to see The Pines play at the Grace, which was awesome, and having a lovely night of dinner with family and several cutthroat games of Clue, all of which my sister won (bitch). I have to admit that in some ways it was harder to leave people the second time around. I don't know why, it just was not as easy to leave as it was the first time around. This time, however, I knew what to expect in going back to England: another awesome semester.