Halcyon Daze
I’ve been invited to attend a mini-conference at Hochschule Bremen on using mobile technologies and user-contributed content in developing guided tours of heritage sites. Let me first observe that Bremen is not an easy place to get to (or indeed away from) if the other end of your journey is Edinburgh. My round trip to attend this mini-Conference at the Hochschule Bremen involves flying from Edinburgh to Luton, then on from Luton to Bremen. The return leg – starting with getting up at 5am – involves a train journey from Bremen to Hamburg, another journey out to the airport, then a flight to Birmingham, and finally a flight back to Edinburgh.
So here I am now in the famed Luton Airport (immortalised by Lorraine Chase, but latterly more famous with a voice-over by Tony Robinson). This is the first time I’ve been in Luton Airport (or as it now grandly titles itself London Luton) since 1973, when I was a mere child and was flying out with my family on a package holiday to Tunisia – the first time I had been abroad. I can remember very little about it, apart from the fact that it was with Horizon Holidays (who later went bust) and that the garishly-painted plane we boarded was named ‘Halcyon Days’. I suspect it’s changed quite a lot in the intervening thirty-four years.
The EasyJet flight down from Edinburgh was fine – no frills needed on such a short journey, after all. Unfortunately, I’m now left with a couple of hours wait before I can check in. Oh well, at least there’s somewhere to site down. I may treat myself to something to eat shortly.