November 01, 2003

European Vacation Part 21: Heading Home!

Ok, here it is, the big anticlimatic finale of our twelve-day European Vaction. Seriously, these pics are pretty much for posterity's sake, if you're looking for a climax, go to the previous entry of our night out in Essex.

chris a, fatty, grant, me — Saturday morning we woke up, double checked our packed bags, thanked Grant's parents for their hospitality, and hit the road for Heathrow.

chris a — Gassing up our little Vauxhal rental.

chris a, fatty, grant, me — Shuttlebus from the rental car drop-off to the terminal.

No smoking on the Concorde, thank you very much.

grant — With some time to kill before the three of us headed to the gate, we decided to take funny pics with Grant. Here's a stop-flash shot of him shaking his head as fast as he can.

grant — And here's the same thing with no flash. Hahaha.

grant — So a few minutes later, G and I are sitting in Burger King kicking it with a coupla Whoppers, and this girl with a really great bum walks by. As soon as she'd passed, Grant was like "Get your camera ready! I want to show you what I'd like to do to that chick's ass." And thus came about my new all-time favorite pic of the Man, the legend, the King of Tee-Effing Ass, Grant "Pow, Howdaya Like Me Now" Stoddard.

grant, me — With our time together disappering almost as fast as our delicious french fries, Grant gives me a "Be brave with out me" thumbs up.

fatty, grant — But not before gratuitious man-hugs were administered by the Fatty.

chris a, fatty, grant, me — With one final pic of the fantasic four, we said goodbye to Grant (who was staying behind in London for another couple of days) and....

fatty, me — ...boarded our plane.

I don't know if it was the weird nostalgia that comes from the end of a trip or if it was the plane's neato yellow engine and bad-ass cautionary graphics that did it...but shortly after becoming airborne I became inspired to start taking some...DRUMROLL....artsy photos! Yay art!

chris a, fatty, me — Here's another one. This one's my pensive and artsy "I'm acting like the camera's not there, but clearly I must know it is because I'm the one who took the picture" picture. Who's more emo than me? Motherfuck this photo diary nonsense, I'm gonna get me a LiveJournal. (ps - look at the two cutey patooties passed out next to me like little sleeping lambs. Teeheehee.)

Attention Staff at the Whitney: you can email me here. I look forward to hearing from you.

The southwestern Icelandic coast as we neared Keflavik for a quick layover.

Same.

Some tiny leeeetle Lego-village near the airport.

This time we only had a less than two-hour layover in Iceland. We had a quick snack, bought some duty free booze, and decided to spend our remaining half hour relaxing in one of the nice lounges near our gate. Well, "relaxing" quickly turned into all three of us falling the fuck asleep. We awoke to the sound of our final boarding call over the loudspeaker.

chris a, fatty — As we scrambled up to the gate we realized that there are probably worse things than being accidentally stranded in Iceland for a day or two.

chris a — I Fatty and Chris managed to sleep most of the last leg of our trip.

After hours of darkness over the Atlantic, we finally hit the eastern seaboard.

New Yawk City!

chris a, fatty, me — Fire up iTunes and here cue up Crüe's "Home Sweet Home." Awww, yeah.

chris a, fatty, me — Here's Chris and Fatty back at my apartment getting ready to head back to their respective homes - so ends our journey.

Between the three of us that had cameras, we managed to take just over 2,000 pictures which I edited down to 21 entries comprised of exactly 790 photos. And so it's with these last few words that I end the European Vacation Series (which is by far, the longest diary project I've ever undertaken). Back to life in NYC!