Fri 13:20 Back in London after a few days visiting parents. While attempting to confirm my flight bookings, I found many scary reviews of and negative comments on Opodo - I could swear I checked this out before I booked my flights through them and they seemed to get mostly OK reviews. Who knows? I am taking some comfort from the fact that Aeromexico's own site accepts my booking reference, so with any luck I am now largely independent of Opodo and it doesn't matter if they are good or not. (My recollection is that when I looked before booking the flight, they had huge numbers of reviews on the sites I looked at, and about 20% of them were really negative, but the other booking site I was looking at had a relative handful of reviews and maybe the same proportion of negatives. There are always going to be some people who are just massively unhappy for no "good" reason - I seem to recall seeing lots of whinging about being charged fees to make changes to tickets, and while I agree the whole process is unpleasant and chiselling, it is something you kind of expect before you start and I doubt anywhere offering budget fares is significantly different.) I'll have to look into this more carefully before any future booking, but fingers crossed I am OK this time anyway.
Going to walk over to town and back to do a tiny bit of extra shopping, though I do have almost everything I need already.
17:40 Actually quite enjoyed the walk today; my feet hurt a bit but not too much. I think what really helped is the feeling that I wasn't under pressure to buy loads of crap; I wanted to get a few bits and pieces but they weren't essential. I did actually manage to get a long-sleeved non-cotton T-shirt in the Tottenham Court Road branch of Mountain Warehouse, so that was a bonus.
Sat 00:10 DIcking around trying to get stuff together to pack. I've dug out my motley collection of SD cards and I'm trying to see if they still work etc. LIke the anal-retentive idiot I am, I left loads of old photos on some of them - presumably on the grounds that "it's an extra copy if I suddenly realise I made a mistake and wiped some other copy" while I was sorting things out after the last trip. Of course, this means that despite being 95% certain I have all these photos safely filed away on my main PC (and backed up along with all my other data), I now have to copy the files off and leave them on my PC's hard drive to check they are duplicates before I delete them. Assuming, of course, I ever get round to doing that. This isn't a seriously problem in terms of packing, but it is a problem in terms of having created unnecessary work for myself later on.
Having heard that you don't get a free plastic bag for the onerous and wanky liquids check at security any more, I've dug one out and just about got my liquids into it. (I'd have liked to use a nice freezer bag with a decent-ish plastic zip on, but I only had one which was too small to get everything in and one which was slightly over the maximum permitted size of 20cmx20cm, and I don't want to give some jobsworth fuckwit any unnecessary excuse to screw me over.) The bag of liquids weighs 600g. I really should look into some of the non-liquid alternatives at some point - this being mainly about weight reduction, but having the added advantage of minimising security shit with liquids. I'm not taking insane quantities of anything here; I could buy a micro-sized tube of toothpaste but unless I'm actually going to be squeaking up against the hand luggage limit for the flight there's no major point doing that kind of thing, because I care more about the weight when I'm lugging the bag round the country, not on the flight, and I'm not going to keep buying micro-sized toothpaste once I get there so I'd be lugging round a full-sized tube anyway. And similarly for other items, not just toothpaste.
While I'm rambling, I picked up a pretty ragged paperback copy of Dorothy Sayers' "Strong Poison" at a charity shop to take with me. I've read it before - though I don't remember it very well - and the plan is that this will seem sufficiently un-valuable that I'll be willing to swap it if I get a chance to do so. Most of my reading will be on my phone or my Nook e-reader, but I like to have at least one physical book - ideally a smallish one, as this one is - for situations where I can't use an electronic device or they're running low on power.
The Nook weighs 200g and I find myself wondering if I shouldn't take it, but unless I'm really tight on weight I probably will. While I'd be pissed off to lose it, it's much less valuable than my phone (I also only ever use it on holiday, so if I lose it on holiday I lost it "doing what it was purchased to do", so to speak) and I can imagine feeling a bit less vulnerable "showing it off" if I want to sit and read somewhere public (e.g. a bus). Unless it has degraded enormously through age and/or lack of use, the battery is also pretty long-lasting and the main thing is that it avoids running my phone battery down "just" so I can read.
Sat 1215 Pretty grey, grim looking morning. Still intend to trog over to Decathlon for some final supplies. I really also need to pick up a small souvenir of London - a keyring or something - as a gift for my Spanish teacher, who I will probably meet in the flesh - but I will probably worry about that tomorrow unless I happen to spot something en route to Decathlon.
With this slightly grim weather, I might as well make a note of something I hope to bear in mind during the trip. I have moments - I suspect I'm not unique in this - when things start to look pretty shitty. For example, I might wake up on Monday morning and think "Fuck, I have to fly tonight. I'm terrified. This is going to be a fucking disaster." The key point to remember when this happens is:
"your feelings are not facts!... If your perceptions make no sense, the feelings they create will be as absurd as the images reflected in the trick mirrors at an amusement park. But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them.
...
Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Your emotions follow your thoughts just as surely as baby ducks follow their mother. But the fact that the baby ducks follow faithfully along doesn't prove that the mother knows where she is going!"
(David D Burns, Feeling Good)
Changing topic completely, I am totally unable to find a headphone adapter for those weird two-pin headphone sockets you (still?) occasionally find on planes. I am pretty sure I had one with my last set of headphones (which have now broken), but I can't find the adapter anywhere. I am not ripping the entire flat apart looking for this - I suspect it fell out of the headphone drawstring bag into my pocket and then into the street at some point over the last few years - and I'll just have to hope the flight doesn't have sockets like that. I am annoyed all the same.
Weather forecast is to piss it down all day. Yay!
19:30 So I walked over to Decathlon and back. It was raining pretty much the whole time, but it wasn't too bad and I got the tiny item I was after. I also just cut my hair; I really wasn't in the mood to do it, it always feels like a massive chore, but it needed doing and now it's over with. Next time I have it done will be a linguistic challenge at a small barber's somewhere in Guatemala. :-)
I need to pack tonight and check I've got everything I need. I could feel a minor temptation to buy more shit in Decathlon - not that there was anything I actually needed, but I think it felt a bit like it might constitute being better prepared and help set my mind at ease. I resisted, however; I have my packing list, I know what I need, and since Decathlon weren't selling confidence-in-a-tube there was no need to buy anything else.
21:00 Continuing to intermittently test my SD card collection. They seem to mostly work; some of them sometimes appear not to, but after enough inserting and removing they then seem to work after all. This makes me a bit edgy but I tend to keep so many different copies of photos when I'm away the chances of losing anything to a single card failure are slim, and while it would be galling to lose a load of photos it's not the end of the world.
It seems hard to be sure, but half the time I suspect the problem is that some of the micro-to-full-size SD card adapters are a bit dodgy (or at least loose).
Sat 00:05 Probably already said this, but I do need to strive not to run around like a blue-arsed fly this trip. Take it easy, don't put pressure on myself. Have fucking lunch even if I got up late; it's supposed to be fun! I'm not going to regret not visiting the cheese museum in Quetzalteopan on my deathbed. (Maybe if I spend several days doing "nothing", I need to have a word with myself. But I need to keep the pressure off otherwise.) I also need to try to resist the temptation to read books/write blog posts on my phone when I'm out and about, partly from a theft deterrent perspective and partly so that I am in with a chance of getting into conversation with people. Need to acknowledge that, yes, I am interested in striking up a conversation rather than deliberately occupying myself with the phone to avoid sitting there feeling like a loser.
Since I'm just waffling, I did read something the other day - can't remember where - which struck a chord. The gist being that people like Cortez and Magellan had genuine reason to be feel nervous before setting out, whereas I don't. There's a well-developed tourist infrastructure where I'm going, fuck, I even more-or-less speak the language. I think the thing is that intellectually I know this, but emotions take no cognisance of these subtleties. (I also know that I would be a bit nervous anyway, but the vaguely scary warnings on the various government travel advice websites are lurking around in my brain and making things a lot worse. Not that I'm too edgy right now, to be honest.)
Sun 16:35 Thanks, Opodo! They've sent me an e-mail saying (and I quote) "Check in before it closes! There's only a few hours left to check in for your flight". Sudden panic, that a) I've missed this b) I will get stuck with a shit seat because I didn't check in ASAP. But no, I just went to the Aeromexico web site and tried to do the check in and it says the check-in window will open in 6 hours, exactly as I'd expect. I assume this is Opodo touting - very confusingly - their own app which will check you in automatically. I am not touching this because I can't find any reviews of it and I suspect it will irrevocably go and check me in and pick a terrible seat without my involvement. Even if there are only terrible seats left when I come to check in myself, at least I'll be able to see for myself instead of having a lingering doubt that I got screwed over by the app.
18:20 So I've finished packing. Except for the billion SD cards which I'm still testing and dithering over. According to my luggage scale - a ridiculous thing to own, given how little I use it, but it was a present - my bag weighs 7.1kg. Numerically this is a pretty decent result; it may in practice be a smidge heavier in day-to-day use as it will have my fleece in and a bottle of water, but I'll wear the fleece to the airport and of course I can't carry the water through because it's a security risk (FFS), so this is the number which will count for being allowed to take the bag as a carry-on. It does feel a little heavier than I'd have liked; I didn't think I was in that bad a shape, maybe I'm not. I can't say this is really ridiculously heavy or anything.
Poking around some old blog entries, assuming I am trusting those luggage scales, my bag weighed 7.3kg (with the daypack - containing the netbook and a few bits and bobs - removed) at Kiev airport in 2013. So I do seem to be doing fairly well, and it does look like I have "saved" the weight of the netbook by not taking it, despite the extra lightweight shell garments I'm having to take this time, since the no-netbook bag now weighs a bit less than the no-netbook bag in Kiev in 2013.
19:05 The brain's a funny thing, eh? I just popped out to Tesco to get a few bits and pieces and walking out of the flat and seeing it was dark and then being in Tesco with the Sunday evening idiots blocking the aisles, I thought "fuck, I'm going tomorrow" and felt a bit pre-homesick.
I bought a 500g bag of dried fruit and nuts to shove in my bag - so there's a chunk of extra weight already. I suspect I'll have to discard those if I haven't eaten them in either Mexico City (where I transit) or Guatemala, but this way I have something to eat if the airline meals are inedible or insubstantial. Barring accidents I have a three hour wait in Mexico City and I really don't want to be buying food in the terminal as a) it's likely to be super-expensive b) I don't want to use my credit card for fear of it being cloned or blocked (this happened to me after using my card at Heathrow in 2006 and I've never got over it...) c) I don't want to withdraw pesos from a cash machine and be stuck with them for months or years just to buy a bit of food. I will probably compromise on those points if I have to, but that's the plan.
I wanted to get a small packet of hard mints to keep in my pocket but my local Tesco couldn't do any better than soft mints or Werther's Original. I'll perhaps pop over to another shop tomorrow; I don't want to be doing too much tomorrow, but I'll probably go nuts if I'm just hanging around waiting to leave all day and if I fail to buy any it's not the end of the world.
22:41 Whew! Checked in online, I got an aisle seat on both flights. I feel amazingly better for this, much more than I expected. FWIW there was no shortage of aisle (or window, for that matter, had I wanted one) seats, but obviously some flights will be different. I was sitting there hitting the refresh button on the web checkin page every minute as the checkin window approach. :-)
In a superstitious touch, I got a seat in a row which I consider a "lucky" number, and I also picked (because there was no real reason to prefer one over another which I could see) exactly the same seat number on both the two flights.
I did look on seatguru.com for the longer of the two flights, although the no-extra-charge good seats at the back had already gone and it didn't otherwise help, but I guess no real harm in looking.
22:59 Have also just sneaked out to deposit the contents of my kitchen bin in a public litter bin; I won't be here on the regular collection day and I don't want this stuff in the flat while I'm away. Just hope I wasn't caught on CCTV and there's no identifying material in the bag; I'm sure the council are red hot on inappropriate use of public facilities in this way.
Mon 01:24 Been tidying up some of the not-packed junk from the floor and so forth. Might have a bath now and then go to bed. Plan is to try to get up earlyish tomorrow for no ultra obvious reason; I do hope to do a tiny bit of shopping (e.g. for mints) but not a big deal, and I want to cook for myself tomorrow too. Probably need to leave the flat about 6pm. I've had a very quick check of the F&CO travel advice for Guatemala; I didn't re-read it all (no point shitting myself up unnecessarily), the key thing is that the advice has not been updated since 7th September so there's no new information to take into account.
Been accumulating this for ages which is probably a bad habit as the draft could get lost, so let me send it now anyway.
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