On dirty socks, mushy peas, and Icelandic volcanoes

Day 11. Still no end in sight to our incarceration. Our captor continues to blow his stack, making escape impossible. Out of money, toothpaste and clean socks, we all pray for the end…..

No, this is not the Diary of Anne Frank, it’s the travel itinerary for the Molinari Family Spring Break 2010. We were supposed to be back in Stuttgart yesterday, but a pesky little Icelandic volcano named “Eyjafjallajoekull” has decided that we should keep eating fish and chips for a few more days.

We arrived here on April 8^th, optimistic for an excellent vacation. Last year, we spent spring break on the Mediterranean coast north of Barcelona, where record-breaking wind and rain storms nearly ruined our whole week. So this year, we decided to go to England, where dreary conditions are to be expected. But ironically, the weather here has been fantastic ÔÇô warm, sunny and clear ÔÇô not an ash cloud in the sky.

Over the course of the next week, we toured castles, punted on the Cam, walked across London from Buckingham Palace to the Tower Bridge, saw a show at Piccadilly Circus, explored the Lake District, visited friends in Glasgow, and ate countless full English breakfasts and hearty pub meals.

A side note on the food: Despite the UK’s reputation for substandard cuisine, we have managed to “tuck in” to half a dozen scones and cream with jam, slabs of bacon, links of sausage, cans of Heinz beans, bowls of sticky toffee pudding, slices of cheese on toast, packages of biscuits, bars of Cadbury, pounds of chips and literally dozens of fried fish with malted vinegar.

The two pairs of jeans I packed have gotten considerably tighter, despite the inevitable stretching that occurs when one wears the same pants repeatedly without washing. Intuitively, I brought two girdle-like Spandex tank tops that I wear under shirts, intended to hold in one’s ponch and back fat. But after 10 straight days of overeating, the effect of wearing the tank is more like packing a gut casing with sausage meat than shaping my figure. I fear I might burst open if I come in contact with a sharp object.

Exactly one week into our trip, we were braving the windy roads of the Scottish West Highlands in our rented manual transmission Kia, praying that the kids would not get car sick. Somewhere outside of Pitlochry, we drove under a digital road sign that announced, “ABERDEEN AIRPORT CLOSED DUE TO VOLCANIC ASH.” My husband and I chuckled, believing the message to be some kind of hoax. “There aren’t any volcanoes in Scotland,” we quipped and continued on our merry way.

Later that night at the home of our Glaswegian friends, we realized that the joke was on us.

Uneasily, we followed our planned itinerary and hoped for the best. The next night I was sitting in the lobby of the London Stanstead Airport Radisson with the kids, watching a trapeze artist swinging on cables around a three-story tower of wine bottles while my husband went to the airport to check on the status of our flight out the next morning. The bizarre trapeze act was meant to attract guests to the hotel, which boasted the “only wine tower in the UK,” but it momentarily distracted us from our bleak circumstances.

Sure enough, my husband returned with bad news ÔÇô our flight was cancelled. Along with countless other travelers staying at the hotel, we surveyed our options, all of which included delaying our departure for several days and incurring significant expense. But, things could be worse, as they say, so we tried to make the best of our circumstances.

My husband extended the car rental and made reservations for us at the Brittania Inn on RAF Alconbury, a sleepy little US base in Cambridgeshire where we could stay in a family room with a kitchenette for only about $60 a night. We made back up reservations for trains from London to Paris and Paris to Stuttgart for Tuesday, when our rescheduled Ryanair flight will most likely be cancelled.

We contacted work, the kennel, neighbors, schools and family to let them know we would not be home as expected. Many people told us to “enjoy our extended vacation” and at first I thought I was being unnecessarily gloomy over the whole thing. But when I realized that we were slowly going into significant debt, I did not have one clean clothing item left in my suitcase and I had gained in excess of 10 pounds, I allowed myself a little pity party.

But today is a new day. The sun is shining brightly again in England. I did three loads of laundry here on base and finally have clean underwear. We are going out for Indian food tonight, and might see the seven-o-clock movie at the tiny base theater. All in all, life is good despite that pesky little Icelandic Volcano.