RAA!ool's Wild Ride

Check out what RAA!!ool has been up to this last week.

Bitter Sweet

Considering that it took a little over 24 hours to return to my beloved England, I'd say bitter sweet describes the day exactly. I love to travel. For a person who can never, NEVER have a job that involves driving through traffic each day- traveling is relaxing for me. I honestly don't mind the delays or the people everywhere. I love to people watch and extra wait time just means that I get to read my book that much longer. :) Today however, certainly caused a bit of trouble.

I left my home in Missouri around 5:30 on Monday to make my 7:30 flight to Minneapolis and then catch the 9:45 on to Heathrow. Everything was moving along smoothly until I made it to Minnesota. I was actually excited when my connecting flight was moved from Atlanta to Minneapolis- I thought "Oh hey this will be great! The airport won't be as busy and there will be fewer problems- HUZZAH!" Well friends, that didn't really turn out that way.

First we were delayed because some other plane was in our spot, then my connecting flight was in G concourse while I was in C and I had about 2 minutes to get there. I make it to my plane sweating and damn near close to an asthma attack but then I find out that we are delayed due to a maintenance thing. Again I thought to myself, "Oh that will be great, I can sit here and relax a bit- we've got all night to fly right? What's an extra 30 minutes or so?"

Famous last words friends.

We sit and we sit and we sit- the powers that be keep assuring us that it will only be another 15 minutes or so. Right. Almost 2 hours later, they give us the unfortunate news that the plane cannot take off and we will have to wait for a new one. This isn't the ideal situation but at least there's another plane right? :) They told us it would fly out at 3:30 AM but that friends turned into almost 5 AM. You know, there's only so much you can do in an airport in the middle of the night. I would also like to point out that those floors are not meant for anyone to sleep on.

I will say though, my spirits were still high! :) I had a great book to read and they gave us food vouchers and even gave us $100 Delta bucks in case we want to give them a second chance. Not likely boys. ;) The flight over went great (once we finally took off) there were great movies to watch and the chicken was pretty tasty.

I finally make it in to Ol' Blighty and a feeling home sweet home envelops me. I had forgotten how much this place means to me. I had a long trek from Heathrow down to Horsham- but it gave me the chance to see the city and take it all in.

I wanted to stay in Horsham because when I came here before that's where I lived. I wanted to get here early and see my old English family and get settled in. So I arrive at the last train stop in my old English town and I realize how late it is and that I have forgotten to book a room for the night. Opps! "No worries!" I tell myself- (I wish I would stop giving myself advice) "It's a tiny English town- surely there is one little room for moi!" But since today is the travel day from hell- I of course was wrong again! I called everywhere and not one hotel-bed and breakfast-or lonely shack on the street had a room for me.

So what do you do when it's midnight and you're in a foreign country and you have no where to stay?

Sit on the side of the road and panic of course!! :)

Thankfully, a cab driver took pity on me and took me around to other hotels until we found one just outside of Horsham. So here's my break down of the day:

Traveling the underground to get to the train station- $5

Train back to visit my lovely Horsham- $20

Making endless phone calls using your credit card trying to find somewhere to stay- amount unknown since my card stopped working after a while

Buying a train ticket back to Gatwick to find a hotel service only to find that there are no more trains running this evening- $6

Driving round Horsham and the surrounding area looking for someone who will take me in-$35

Finally finding a place (though I think they only took me in because of my tear stained-face and red eyes) and getting to take a hot shower- priceless.

Click here to view my first podcast!

Check out my first podcast!

London Baby!

This will serve as my personal blog to document my time in London and Paris this summer. Here you will find my reflective yet random thoughts during my time and also plenty of visual aspects to show what an amazing time I'm having!! :) ENJOY!

DIIGO

I have just started using a great social bookmarking tool called Diigo.  Diigo allows you to bookmark your favorite web sites and store them online.  The best part is that you can make notes right on the web sites and Diigo saves everything for you on your online account.  Diigo does have special accounts for educators so you could use it for your classes. 

Animoto is a greta site to use for making videos.  Students can use this tool to advertise and share what books they have read by creating short videos for them.  It is also a great opportunity to show students the images shared on creative commons on Flickr.  Here people share their images and students can clearly see how people are willing to share their photos.  Below is a video I made to advertise two books.  I used the images from Creative Commons and the music came directly from Animoto's site.

Below is a widget for my LibraryThing.  LibraryThing allows you to create an online library of books and tag the books with any tag you feel relevant to the book.  Students would be able to have an online account of the books they read.  They would be able to search the tags of others to find more books they enjoy.  As a class, students could all use the same tag for their books so others in the class could search that tag and see what others in the class are reading.  Students can also write reviews to let others know what they thought of the book.  LibrayThing puts readers in control of their books and how they wish to organize them.  Its free and easy to use.  Students and classes will find many reasons to include LibraryThing in their online world.