My Summer Holiday, by The-Truth-Will-Strike-You-Down. Copyright 2008.

Part 1: Plane pains

I had looked forward to our trip all year. Not only did it involve going to one of my favourite places on the planet, but also seeing a collection of people I rarely get to see. My father, Mark, lives and works in Edinburgh and I don‘t see him as often as I would like. Separated parents, while being a major travel bonus, is not a barrel of laughs. Harold, my brother, is 20 years old and has been studying in America, from high school to college, since he was 16. My best friend, Jessie, lives a ten-hour car drive away in Norwich, and phone calls just aren’t quite the same as the laughs we can have when we are together. Other than these, I would get to see my grandparents, two uncles and one aunt, and my many little cousins, all of whom live in the USA.

However as I sat in Edinburgh airport with Dad I couldn’t help but feel butterflies in my stomach: I was going to be on a different flight than him all the way to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam where, all being well, I would meet Jessie and her parents to continue the journey to Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts. Talking through all the worst-case scenarios, while intended to prepare me, had added a tangible sense of dread to my excitement. As he left to board his earlier flight, Dad hugged me and said he’d see me in Boston. I fidgeted for an hour or so until it was my turn to board. Having spent the previous night up until 2am at a hilarious Fringe Festival show put on by a company I have grown to love, I can’t actually remember very much about my first flight, except that I woke up just in time for food and spent some time talking to a nice German woman.

Contrary to my fears, the “Amsterdam Rendez-vous”, as we came to call it, went perfectly smoothly. I stepped out of the tube connecting the plane to the terminal and straight away I saw Jessie waiting for me. After our reunion, Jessie and I and her parents, Tom and Jane, had a bite to eat and got on our next flight: the long haul, Amsterdam-Boston. Luckily, the in-flight entertainment was good. I watched X-Men while Jessie watched Prince Caspian, then, having heard each other’s reviews of our films, we swapped.

Upon arriving in Logan airport we had to fill out the usual papers. By this time I was so tired I managed to misspell my own first name and subsequently needed a new form. Then, we collected our bags and found a waiting room in which to wait for my Dad. Having visited Boston a fair few times in my life, I recognised a large glass case filled with an enormous automated and noisy marble run, for want of a better word, filled with tennis-sized coloured rubber balls. I had seen it before, or a version of it, at the Boston Science Centre. If it weren’t for this, Jessie and I may have gone quite mad during our stay in that particular room. Dad’s journey, I found out after several pay-phone phone calls with my Grampa, had consisted of a complicated collection of delays, causing him to be several hours late. Jessie and I spent those hours naming different balls in the case and watching their progress, as well as occasionally cheering them on, looking at the strange and foreign American “candy” in the newsagent and making a banner for my Dad on some paper hand-towel.

In the end he reached us and we finally arrived my grandparents’ house in Cape Cod.

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