From Heathrow to Oxford--An Update

[Ebony AKA AngieJ]

Thanks for all the advice, everyone!  Dai, Simon, Michelle, and Al--
you all gave excellent suggestions, and I want to thank you for being 
so cool about offering them.  :-)

It turns out that my mom's youngest brother decided yesterday that I 
should take a cab... which will be astronomically expensive, but he 
says he's perfectly willing to defray the cost.  He lives in Chicago 
anyway, which is where I'll be taking off from.

As my uncle's an exec for a web company and speaks fluent French and 
Arabic, his work necesitates travels abroad quite a bit.  He vetoed 
the idea of me doing either the bus or the train with luggage for six 
weeks.  (I'm notorious in our family for bringing everything but the 
kitchen sink whenever I leave town... including a bag full of books I 
cannot live without.)

"You can take the bus on your way back home, because then you'll be a 
bit more oriented," he said.  My aunt agreed:  "Take the path of 
least resistance, hon... the faster you get there, the faster you can 
recover and sleep."

Then again, I hear traffic in greater London is horrible... and I'll 
be arriving just before the morning rush hour, right?  :-(

As far as the hair thing is concerned, don't worry about it anymore.  
Once I get there, I can do my own research... and I just learned that 
the better African-American hair mags actually have addresses and 
phone numbers of salons abroad.  Woo-hoo!

And if that won't suffice, I can always shave my head bald as an egg 
and start a new trend when I return home.  <vbg>

If I think of anything else soon, I'll let you guys know.

--Ebony (whose uncle told her a lot of other funny stuff about his 
travels in Europe and North Africa, and made her feel a lot less 
anxious)