What a Rocky road it was. Allow me some time to recall the last three days here in Ireland. But first, the trip to Ireland itself was quite nerve racking, considering all the delays, missed flights, rebookings, and sprinting from terminal to terminal. The journey began at Philadelphia International Airport. I arrived and checked in for my flight somewhere around 4 o’clock PM. Nothing unusual. Then I get on the plane, sit in my middle row seat, still nothing out of the ordinary. Then the captain announced there were sixteen (!) flights in front of us before we could take off. He wasn’t sure why, but the captain thought it was because of all the 9/11 ceremonies slowing every flight on the east coast down. So, a flight that was supposed to depart at 6:15 PM didn’t really fly until about 7:20 PM. We didn’t land in Boston Logan until around 8:20 PM.
If you’re unfamiliar with Boston Logan Airport, let me sum it up, you need to take a shuttle between all the terminals. By the time I discovered which terminal I had to be at, and which shuttle will actually take me to said Terminal (it was Terminal E, by the way. I landed in Terminal B) between 20 and 25 minutes had passed. I finally get to the Aer Lingus station to get my boarding pass, they turned my right around saying the plane had already finished boarding, and was about to take off. I was too late. Completely distraught, I wandered my way back to Terminal B to talk to the US Airways people. It took about a half hour to finally find someone. I talk to the woman there, and she has me about ready to burst down in tears. As helpful as she was trying to be, telling my the next flight to Dublin was 6 PM the next day wasn’t exactly the news a first time flier wants, or even needs, to hear. Luckily her younger male associate came out to assist her, and he awesomely found me a flight to London Heathrow Airport at 10:55 PM later that night, with a connecting flight soon after I arrived in London. I sprinted across the way to the American Airlines terminal (which was the airline going to London), and get on.
The flight was not too shabby. I got about a two hour nap on it and woke up about 45 minutes before the plane was supposed to land. We actually arrived at London around 10 AM, London time. But due to delays on the ground, the airport told our flight to keep circling. We circled around London for about a half an hour. My new connecting Aer Lingus flight was scheduled about 45 minutes after I landed. As you can see, there seems to be a pattern here. Remember when I described Boston Logon earlier? Take that, and multiply it by 3, and you get London Heathrow. Clearly, I didn’t stand a chance getting to that Aer Lingus flight either. So, after a lengthy line through security and customs (apparently, I still had to go through customs in the UK to get to the Republic of Ireland, even thought they’re two separate, sovereign countries. Not sure how that works) I get all the way through, find the Aer Lingus terminal, and practically begged the woman at the desk to let me on the next flight to Dublin. She was awesome with getting me on, but she was really curious why I had no bags (yes, they were left in Boston this whole time, except I still couldn’t claim them when I was there because they went to baggage purgatory). But the Aer Lingus woman in London was very kind and helpful in both getting me on the next flight to Dublin and contacting Dublin about my bags.
So finally I get on the Aer Lingus plane and, lo and behold, there more delays. There was somewhere between 6 and 9 planes before our plane could take off. So it takes off and lands in Dublin around 2:15 or 2:20 PM, Dublin time. Going through customs was easy, they just looked at my passport, looked at my acceptance letter, took a picture of me, and then I was off to baggage claim. The Aer Lingus baggage claim woman was fairly helpful. I’ll spare the details there though, a lot of it was misunderstandings, but she got the gist of how I could get the bags at my hotel and it wasn’t a problem.
Then I find an aircoach bus that is supposed to take my right to my hotel. The ticket taker was not at all helpful in explaining which bus will lead me to my hotel. I had to ask one of the bus drivers who pulled in, and he curtly replied that it was not his route but another one. So when that particular bus route arrived, I hopped on. The driver goes all the way to the end of the route and forgot where I wanted to get off. He knew I wasn’t from around there, considering the American accent. Luckily, the path to the hotel was a straight walk, and according to him, it should’ve taken 15 minutes.
A little word of advice to anyone unfamiliar with the Irish judgment of distances: whenever an Irish person tells you something is a 15 minute walk, in American distance, it’s at least twice that time, and in some cases thrice that time. But anyway, I finally got to the hotel and checked in at 4:55 PM exactly. I was supposed to be there by at least 2 PM. Luckily though, none of the events started until 5:15 PM. I got lucky there, but the jet lag was still quite the bitch.
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