After a full day on busses from Edinburgh, I made it to Manchester where I was going to meet up with Jake Cook, another I-House Alum. I was met by Kat, Jake’s girlfriend, a couple blocks away from their apartment, and she showed me the way in. I took a massive nap after having a big night out while Kat prepped us a delicious pasta bake.

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After waking up, Jake had us on a mission for another night out on the town. We had some drinks and met up with a bunch of Jake’s work friends before heading to a club. We got VIP treatment at the club because Jake’s girlfriend works there, and we had a good night out. On the way home though, near disaster struck.

Somewhere between leaving the club with Jake, having our junk fondled by some crazy prostitute, and hopping on the bus back to his apartment, I lost my passport. I didn’t even realize I had lost it until the next morning because I went straight to bed when we got back. I ended up being ridiculously lucky, because I had left my flight itinerary in the pages which had my email address on it. As a result, someone had turned my passport into the Oxford Road Station where someone named Nigel was able to craft me an email with the info on how to get my passport back. I had already purchased flights from Manchester to Amsterdam, and from Amsterdam to Prague. If I hadn’t got my passport back it would have ruined those plans, and forced me to go back to London to request and wait for a new passport. Near disaster. We stuffed our faces with some chinese all you can eat buffet and called it a day.

The next morning Jake and I headed out to a place called “the lake district” by minibus with the “Reach Out” charity counselers that Jake wors with. These were some of the same people we had gone out with my first night in Manchester. It was a beautiful drive out to the lake district, and when we got there we went on a really nice hike up and around the park. After a full day in the English countryside, we got home to make up dinner and chill out with a movie.

Somehow in all this I managed to finish my second book of the trip, a novel called Turbulence about a Scottish weatherman working to predict the weather over the English channel for D-Day. How appropriate that I would finish the book just before flying over the English channel, and having just come from Scotland!