Wrote this for an email to my parents. Day 1 of the 5 day excursion. I don't know how I ended up writing so much...

Wait by the car and we'll go, we'll go!
But Oh Valencia, With your blood still warm on the ground, Valencia,
And I swear to the stars, I'll burn this whole city down. – O’Valencia by The Decemberists

Planes, Trains and Automobiles – Day 1

Nick and Ze’s adventure started at 9 o’clock when we left rainy (obviously) Derby for Ze’s parents’ house somewhere in London. Got there, refuelled on multibean soup, stowed the car in the car hole (commonly referred to as garage) and left carrying backpacks and bike boxes to the bus stop. One rammo bus ride later and we were at a London train station, don’t ask me which one, I didn’t know. Luckily Ze had a handle on the whole route planning game and we soon arrived at Gatwick.

One important thing to note is that only one of the terminals has a Burger King – the one we were not flying from. To say I was distraught would be an understatement, I filled my Burger Kingless sorrow with a Boots meal deal. Rob had gone straight to the airport from his half day at work and the three of us checked in along with a 12 strong hen party also headed for Valencia, we headed through to the airside part of Gatwick. Robin and Perry were still MIA as the end of Check-In time drew closer, a phone call found that they were en route and had an ETA of ‘We should just make it… We think’.

They did make it, but needn’t have bothered with the rush as the Easyjet screen added a two hour delay to our flight departure shortly after we met up. Obligatory complaining ensued and we went off in search of more food that wasn’t Burger King.

An announcement came on directing passengers of our flight to the Easyjet information desk, we were led without explanation down to the arrivals lounge. Our previously checked-in luggage was curiously awaiting us when it should have been expectantly awaiting us on the plane.

I was surprised how calmly our group reacted to the piece of news that was delivered to us by a rather ‘rugged’ looking/acting female Easyjet employee. I believe she got her job for just these qualities as they set her in good stead for the reactions of the majority of passengers upon hearing that the flight was cancelled. To be fair, some of the passengers had legitimate reason to be angry or upset, some were flying to see family members or had important events to attend, and to be fair to Easyjet it wasn’t their fault at all. France air traffic control weren’t playing ball and were only allowing a limited number of flights to pass over their cheese infested country.

I put our calm handling of the situation down to being a bmxer living in the UK, we are constantly let down by the weather and spots being destroyed so a little inconvenience such as our flight not happening was almost to be expected. We found that Easyjet would either refund the flight or we could swap for another flight. Ze queued whilst we all studied the map of Europe displaying airports Sleazyjet flew to. The criteria wasn’t too much to ask; good weather, potential stuff to ride and cheap beer. This pretty much ruled out anything but southern destinations, most of which appeared to be island holiday resorts which would have been ideal if we all had shaved heads, wife beaters and a combined IQ of around 52.

All Spanish flights were understandably snatched up pretty quick by other flyers leaving us with flights the next morning to Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt), Marrakech (Morocco) and Istanbul (Turkey). If Ze had been playing cards at this time he would’ve lost, horribly. A poker face he did not have. You could see how excited he was that we wouldn’t be going to Spain (its no secret that Ze feels that we’ve been to Spain a lot and that we should go somewhere else) and instead had the choice of three more exotic, culturally different cities.

Coincidentally there was a Marrakech trip article in the newest Ride magazine that Perry had a copy of, we flicked through the photos but Robin was unconvinced having been there on holiday before. “It’s a cool place, loads going on, but really we’d just be riding up mud roads – not fun”. Ze was doing a fine sales pitch on Sharm El Sheikh, which was promptly renamed to Camel Shake for the rest of us that couldn’t pronounce it. It was sounding promising until we heard from an Egyptian lady in the queue, that the police and security there would not take kindly to us riding on their buildings. My preconceptions of Egyptian security (based on no facts whatsoever) figured losing a hand for doing a wallride on a Sphinx would not be a fair exchange, I was put off as were the other 3 for whatever reason.

This left Istanbul (not Constantinople) as the only alternative to sullenly going back to a wet Derby for 4 days. We used the ever increasingly useful i-phone to check the weather forecast for Istanbul. It didn’t look ideal, warm enough but threatened showers on and off over the next 4 days, we rolled the metaphorical dice and changed our flight destination to Turkey (a place which joined the ever lengthening list of countries that eluded my GCSE A grade geography qualification).

Easyjet stumped up for a hotel where we could stay until the flight early next morning, they did not stump up for cost of the bus ride to the hotel. Our group stuck out like a sore thumb in the very nice hotel, 5 ratty bmxers in the lobby with bike boxes complaining at the 5 pound pint prices were probably not their usual clientele. Dinner was rustled up for Easyjet customers, afterwards Ze did his best Aladdin impression and liberated some bread rolls for our breakfast. We booked Istanbul’s ‘No.1 hostel’ via the hotel’s internet and Perry got a round in, nice one! I hadn’t packed a towel for the trip so thought it only polite to permanently borrow a medium hand towel rather than a large bath towel. I had actually not seen the larger sized towels and mine left me with a fetching gap to flash a bit of leg or other body parts. Damn.

An uncomfortable sleep was interrupted by the early morning alarm signalling 15 minutes until the bus to the airport would arrive. Naturally we stayed in bed for a further 10 minutes and got to the bus stop as the bus pulled up. By now we had very little UK currency left and at 3 pounds a bus ticket we fell far short. We got a little haggling practice in and bargained 5 pounds for the lot us to the airport.