Christ. Okay, I can do this one. Anyone whose respect I haven’t managed to completely destroy yet, besides having way too much faith in me, really shouldn’t read this one. Seriously. Of everything I’ve written (or haven’t written; academic post still coming, as soon as it stops evolving), this is the one most likely to draw the rage of the Frances L. Philips Travel Scholarship Committee and UNC, to say nothing of my grandparents. However, I resolved to do it (while I was still drunk, so that should tell you something about my judgment), because I believe there’s a niche market for guides to drunkenly navigating places you shouldn’t be drunkenly navigating, and because it amuses me. Also, I figure that if I can turn my mistakes into an educational opportunity, then that’s kind of like community service, so no one can come down on me too hard… right?

DISCLAIMER: All of it. Literally, if I did something in this post, it is the opposite of what you should do, except for the Rules. This includes being drunk at all, stealing a cowboy hat, being in an airport for any reason, hell, even the bacon roll. Just… don’t. Listen to your D.A.R.E. officers.

For your entertainment, I’m turning this into a musical. Mozart popped up in my queue first, and it seems like as good a place as any to begin. Feel free to join my adventures, just press play as you go along!

So if you’re anything like me, you believe that leavetakings deserve a proper celebration. And if you’re anything like me, you have a hard time distinguishing between ‘celebration’ and ‘public execution’. So I dragged the hostel Edinburgers (or they dragged me, or both) down to the Royal Mile Tavern for a last send-off. The last thing I remember saying is, “Relax! I still have eight hours before my bus to the airport!”

Nine hours later, I found myself being shaken awake by Heather, the best Aussie desk attendant in Edinburgh. Which brings me to my first rule:

RULE #1: Always set alarms. These aren’t to wake you up, nothing that doesn’t break the skin is going to do that. No, the alarms are to wake other people up, who after five minutes or so will gather and begin to ask each other, “Wasn’t he supposed to be up by now?”

However, this won’t work with either Australians or anyone in their twenties, and it sure as hell isn’t going to even nudge a room full of Australians in their twenties, especially on a Sunday night, and especially if you brought them to the bar in the first place. Which brings me to:

RULE #2: Tell everyone, especially the desk staff, your travel plans, no matter how much they don’t care. The more people that know when you have obligations, the more likely that at least one will be sober and awake enough at four in the morning to look around, realize nobody’s seen you in a while, and think to themselves, Oh, shit.

So Heather shakes me awake an hour after I’d resolved to be up, and to go the extra mile she’s even made me a cup of coffee (or two, or I just saw my four hands holding two cups; not sure on that point). Some small part of me is screaming, ‘WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!’, but that part of me still wasn’t as loud as the part going, “WHEEEEEE! All this time, my sense of balance was the only thing standing between me and constant fun!” Yes, it would be about twenty minutes before I would be capable. Luckily, I remembered:

RULE #3: Be prepared, but have a back-up plan. No one knows you better than yourself, so you can be honest with how badly you’re planning on screwing this up. In my case, this included making sure I knew several REGULAR bus routes to the airport, one coming every fifteen minutes from a stop I’d marked on my map. I had my two tickets in my back pocket, and copies in my bag in case, worse case scenario, I lost my pockets (I’ve done crazier). In case of emergency, I’d also saved a bit of both bus fare and taxi fare in a pocket I wouldn’t go digging in for booze change the night before. Luckily, I didn’t have to use the taxi fare, but make sure you’ve got it just the same. And of course:

RULE #4: Pack your belongings THE NIGHT BEFORE. This one is absolutely essential, whether you plan on celebrating or not. You need those extra twelve hours to figure out if that feeling of “Did I forget something…” is paranoia or instinct. And in my case, it saved my ass having to dig through a dark room for my stuff while I was in a state that made standing perfectly still an Olympic sport.

Also, after fewer minutes of sleep than the number of drinks I had, this is my mood. Adjust accordingly.

So dragging my luggage out of my room, I discover that this whole time I’d been wearing a black straw cowboy hat, with a Jack Daniels logo on it. I can’t really tell you how long ‘this whole time’ extends; it could have been minutes, it could have been my whole eight-hour adventure time. All I know is that, with my new duster-looking coat, it makes me look like a sheriff. I don’t know where it came from, but before I have time to protest my own poor judgment, I’ve stuffed the damn thing into my backpack, with my laptop and towel. Which leads me to another point:

RULE #5: If your carry-on has a laptop, make sure you pack the rest of the bag smartly, because you will have to pull out that laptop every time you go through security. And if you have to pull out a beach towel and a cowboy hat enough times, someone’s going to get the idea that you’re Kenny Chesney, and that’s no impression of America to leave abroad. Don’t we as a nation make enough mistakes?

This next bit isn’t a rule that anyone else should need, but I put it here because, against all odds, it was the only time I really screwed up in my voyage. And it is:

RULE FOR BRETT ONLY BUT REALLY FOR EVERYONE: Check out properly. As in, don’t wait until you get to the airport to find out that your hostel key has been on you the whole time. By then, there’s pretty much no way to get your deposit back (a reasonable ten pounds in my case), and if you want to leave a good impression at all then you have to go through the pain in the ass of mailing the damn things back. Worst case scenario, you could lose whatever ID your hostel might have taken as a deposit, which could be a local ID card but it might be your passport (!). So, you know, do better. If you doubt your capability at all, try hanging them on a cord around your neck the night before so everyone has a chance to remind you on your way out.

Right then, so I’m dragging my luggage through the streets of Edinburgh, and at this point I’m still pretty much absent. We are, in fact, on auto-pilot for the majority of the day from this point. Luckily, I’d prepared my luggage and knew my bus was a regular thing, so I wasn’t screwed just yet. After a bit of confusion with the stops, I found the Airlink and was on my way. That was the easy part, and the pre-counted airport bus change meant that I didn’t have to stand in front of the driver for ten minutes, holding up coins to my eye and trying to figure out how much each is worth.

Now we’re at the airport, and I’ve officially hit the gauntlet. I have 140 pounds of bags, one a ripped derffle bag (refer to the Luggage post), to get checked in, and I’ve got to get myself through security without betraying my state of mind, all in an hour and thirty minutes. Not a simple task in the best of conditions, and for me it will require nothing less than hawk swiftness, ox strength and cobra cunning. Time to put on my eyeglasses.

Bags checked. Tickets scanned. Airport personnel stunned by my efficiency and courtesy, and none the wiser. All thanks to great big brightly lit signs in easy to read fonts. Which is great, because otherwise I’d still be in Edinburgh. All right then. Security.

I’d heard stories of drunks being turned away from the airport before when security gets tipped off to their intoxication. Anticipating this, I’ve brushed my teeth and deodorized, but that isn’t going to be enough. My head is still swimming, but the queue is drawing me closer to the scanners.

Lucky for me, feigning sobriety is a task I’ve been preparing for since I started college.

Since I started drinking in moderation strictly at the legal age of twenty-one and only in responsible venues with individuals I also knew to be twenty-one or older, I’ve had a habit of testing my own verbosity and social etiquette to make sure I can still pass among the living. Up until now, I’ve only practiced this at parties and at three in the morning, in restaurants (Q’DOBA I MISS YOU!) and passing cops on my way home.

This morning is going to be my greatest challenge: entirely deprived of sleep and with my liver bearing a heavy burden than my suitcases stacked together, I’m about to come face to face with the folks in charge of defending the country’s borders.

(The astute among you will know that, while Edinburgh’s airport is international, the flight from Edinburgh to London is technically a domestic flight. And if you really enjoy ruining the drama of the story, fine. Be that way. Why don’t you just ruin that there’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy or Joe Camel in the comments for all the kids that read my blog. You disgust me)

Security really just consists of getting all your junk off your body and pulling our your laptop. In my state, the first proves much easier; if there’s anything you can do tipsy, it’s take your clothes off, because sometimes you just feel so disgusting that fabric being on your body makes you a little nauseous. So belt, keys, phone, jacket, etc. gone. The laptop comes out, after a bit of stumbling, but lucky for me everyone around me is also having a hard time just existing. It’s 5:30 in the morning. Nobody notices.

So I stand in front of the scanner, and the woman going through gets patted down. Then the guy after me. Now I’ve never been groped by airport security, so I’m thinking, is this the day? Because, you know, it’d make a great story. I’m starting to regret that I didn’t wear my getting-groped pants (I was jumping up on a stone ledge in Dublin, and they ripped front to back). Hey, if they’re going to do this, I want them to be more uncomfortable about it than I am.

And of course, when I go through they just wave me on my way. You don’t want to get groped, and they’ll violate you for ten minutes. You get perky about some drunken mid-morning slap and tickle, and they hurry you through. Isn’t that always the way of it.

Also, as easy as it is to get your stuff off tipsy, it’s proportionally just as difficult to get it back on. So that was fun. At any rate, I’ve officially made it through security. The hard part’s over.

My victory song. You’re also welcome to picture that as my airport outfit, which would make the lack of groping reasonable.

Right then. Now that I’ve essentially caught my flight, against all odds, I decide to call Thomas. Which brings me to my next bit of advice:

RULE #6: Be very aware of your surroundings, particularly what you shouldn’t say or do in them. For example, perhaps resist the temptation to call up your significant other if the first thing you’re going to say, very loudly, is, “GUESS WHO JUST GOT THROUGH SECURITY DRUNK?!” In addition to betraying your classlessness to everyone around you, you run the risk of giving any of the security personnel, all of who are also awake at 5:30 in the morning and most of whom haven’t had the same enjoyable night as you, a reason to work out their aggression.

Now with an hour before you fly, you might be wondering how you can both kill time and keep from passing out in an airport (which will end badly, see Rule #6). I shouldn’t need to tell you this, because likely your instincts will lead you to the same conclusion. However, here it is anyway:

RULE #7: DO eat something. Travel can be very stressful, particularly if you haven’t been taking care of yourself (or if you make outright stupid decisions), and one of the best ways to prepare yourself and make sure you’re as alert as you need to be is to have a decent breakfast, ideally with carbs, sugar and protein. This is not the time to be weight-conscious, you’re on some serious business. For my part, I chose an airport café pre-made bacon roll (please, Europe, learn to do bacon like we do here: thin strips, fried to a char, not thick chunks of ham) and a bottle of Irn-Bru, because when am I ever going to see bubblegum-flavored soda again. And I destroyed that thing. I went at that bacon roll like it killed my family and ripped up all the watermelon vines in the garden on the way out. And walking back, I learned my last rule. And this is a big one:

RULE #8, THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: Do not hit on, make a pass at, flirt with, or in any other way indicate the attractiveness of the security personnel carrying automatic weapons. Now this is probably just a harmful side effect of growing up in the US, but there is something intriguing about a gun half your height. I’ve seen all the same action movies as everyone else, even if I may have viewed them through a different lens. Anyway, it’s rare you actually get to see anyone carrying a lethal weapon that size, and it’s rarer still that it happens while you’re in a state that destroys your judgment. Plus, it’s true what they say about people in uniforms. So you put it all together.

Now as a married man and an introvert by nature, I have to confess that of course I didn’t hit on a guy carrying a gun. However, I also have to confess that it had nothing to do with my reservations, so much as it did this one little fact:

In the whole world, nothing looks so much like it needs to be shot with multiple automatic weapons to restore peace to the galaxy as me when I’m eating a bacon roll drunk.

BONUS VID: Me taking off. That’s right, I’m defying the captain to show you how that went. Because I save the best for last.

Some of you might think that there’s something sad in having to structure my life so much in anticipation of being irresponsible. To you, I say, my elaborate planning indicates my responsibility, regardless of how much I remember and despite all evidence to the contrary. I’ve always been told to know my limits, not to avoid tempting them altogether, and I clearly know my limits intimately. Also, I present my go-to counter-argument until I’m at least twenty-five: it was fuuuuuuuuun. Like, way fun. So there. Was it stupid? Of course, it was ridiculously stupid. Would I do it again? Let’s pretend I wouldn’t, if that helps everyone feel better.