How not to go home for Christmas - Part 1
I like to think of myself as a logical person. Occasionally though, I have predilictions which might be a little too strongly held to be rational. One of these is that I detest paying a high fare for flying between London and Ireland, and will go to interesting lengths to avoid this. For example, when booking flights home for christmas I decided, to save money, that I would take a plane to Dublin instead of Shannon, and then take a train from Dublin. I only paid about £70 for the flights, and I would get to see some Dublin inhabitants, so I felt quite satisfied with my idea.
Day 1
The day before I was supposed to fly, London lived up to a fine longstanding tradition, and coated itself in fog. Major transportation disaster, Heathrow cancels all domestic flights (in which for some reason, they include Dublin), and flights out of Stansted are delayed by hours, about half of them don’t leave at all, and so on. Charming. So I leave work at 5.30 for my 9.30 flight, get to the airport an hour later, check in, and promptly spend about 7 hours in a terminal. My 7 hours of deep boredom and annoyance is peppered with occasional spurts of excitement as we change queues and gates several times, however I end up spending about a tenner on wireless internet to keep myself from falling asleep like the people camping all around me.
Finally, at about 1am, we are getting on the plane. Which sat quietly on a runway for 40 minutes before actually taking off. To be fair, the fog is thicker than I was expecting, you could barely see 15 feet, and were it not for Ryanair’s blatant disregard for human life I probably wouldn’t have made it home at all unless I chose to swim the irish sea. So even at the time, despite the crap, I was grateful to just be getting home. Once we took off it was an even shorter flight than usual, and we landed in Dublin at about 2.40, at which point I grabbed my luggage, ran out of the terminal, and jumped straight onto a cheap bus to the city.
Once more I fought to stay awake, and was aided in this by frequent phone calls from the yank, who was of course still awake in Vermont. Aided and somewhat distracted, because when I finally exited the bus in Dublin, I almost walked off without my luggage, accustomed as I am to not carrying any. I dashed back to the bus and grabbed my suitcase from its niche in the hold just in time, and then spent about 40 minutes trying to get a taxi. Eventually, at about 4am, I finally got to the home of my good friend A, utterly exhausted.
After a bit of catch-up and girly chatting I was falling asleep where I sat, so stood up to go to bed, and discovered that there was about an inch of a split in the seam of my trousers, just at the arse. Relieved that I could switch them for something else in my suitcase in the morning, I disregarded this entirely, and collapsed into bed, regarding my longer-than-expected journey as all but complete, with the difficult part most certainly over.
Hah.
February 21st, 2007 at 8:44 pm
How foolish. For a much travelled girl you still should have known that no journey in your life could be even that straightforward. Besides the travel god would have been in trouble with our entertainment god if you didn’t run into difficulties and keep us amused afterwards with the retelling. When we know you are ok of course.