I like to travel alone, over the years I’ve headed out with others, FJ, Jellicle, Imp, Weasel to name a few, but really what I like to do is just hop onto a road and see where it takes me. Today is almost the complete opposite of that. Today I’m taking eleven LURPS members (twelve including me) from Manchester to Athens.
Everyone made it to the railway station, Penguin Chloé messaging to say her family were dropping her off at the airport and we’d already arranged for Top Jo to join us at Piccadilly. Jellicle and DS Luke came to see us off. But then it was ten of us jam-packed into three carriages bound for the airport. I mean seriously who puts on a three carriage train to do that route?!?
Along the rail journey the group facebook chat came into it’s own with us deciding on the important things in life like what the hashtag for the trip should be (#greeceisthenerd) and me nearly missing Top Jo saying she was now meeting us at the airport. I had my own fun by starting to assign XP to people based on the silliness of the League positions in the document I and DS Luke had put together. Jellicle & he looked over my final message as LARP Rep to the LURPS refs (see yesterday’s entry) and I left the relevant facebook chats for the last time.
Then the airport and time for me to hand out boarding passes, tell people how to check luggage and for the first time experience heading across an airport with a friend in a wheelchair. Sitting down in the land of free refills across the other side of the airport (Burger King) we were joined by the rest of the party and began our long wait. The flight ended up delayed by half an hour but that wasn’t annoying until the queue at the gate which seemed to take forever. (Though apparently a woman fell the full length of the stairs onto the plane so I should be more sympathetic).
The flight itself I mostly dozed but I did also pass out character sheets for each person’s assigned buddy to fill out. It was a light hearted bit of nonsense (that has ended up with full on XP spend calculation and a spreadsheet with equations) but if ever I was to design a nerdy icebreaker this would be it! They talked to each other discussing what skills they had, who was good at what and whether to assign skills they thought would be used over skills that represented them.
Yannis met us at the other end and we got on a coach to the middle of nowhere. Some vegetable soup later and I’m curled up listening to the wind outside in a room with the Interuptor, My Little Sister, 90 Minutes and the Little Blonde Keener. I’ve no idea what to expect tomorrow but today’s ended pretty well.