Dublin, And Our Irish Luck

As far as I've been able to determine, I'm pretty darn Irish. Evidence: mom's maiden name is Murray, I have a reddish tint to my hair, plus a couple of very red strands right up front,y family can hold their booze, and I can be pretty loud at times. So maybe it was this bit of Irish luck that allowed us to make our flight from London to Ireland.

Part I: getting to the airport. Easier said than done at 3:15 in the morning. There is no regular tube or bus service that early, and the shuttle to the airport was pretty far away. We could either walk over a mile through the city at 3 am, or catch anshuttle right from our hostel. Even though it wasthe more expensive of the two options, the shuttle won. So we woke up, jeff sprinted to the ATM to get cash, and then we waited. And waited. We waited to the point if worrying that we would miss our flight. Finally the shuttle arrived, and we got to the airport with what we thought was plenty of time to get to the plane.

Part II: Boarding Passes. Question to all of my friends who had flown ryanair while studying abroad. Why didn't you tell me about the boarding passes?!?! I thought that I would be able to print my boarding pass at the airport, like I do with every other airline. Wrong. We get to the ticket counter and plead with the nice lady to print our passes. No go. It would cost £40 to print each paper. Because they print it on pure gold. WTF. Oh but there is a kiosk with printers and computers over there. After frantically throwing pounds at the machine, we were able to print our passes and check in. Then we get to security. Our gate is due to close in 15 minutes. I make it pass the security officer but jeff
doesn't. She stops him and then calls me back. Turns out not all of out boarding passes printed. We would need to go see a ryanair agent and have them print us new boarding passes. She said she would expedite us to the front of the line when we got back. We race to the
only free agent and he prints us new passe (that wasn't that hard, was it ryanair?) we are then ushered to the front of the security line. We ate behind two sweet, but painfully slow old men, but I make it through with no problems. Wish I could say the
same for Jeff...

Part III: airport security. 10 minutes till the gate closes. "sir, we need to take each item
in your bag out. Our machine detects some sort of liquid. I run ahead to the gate while jeff watches the security agent take each piece of clothing out of his bag. The culprit? Condensation in his water bottle. And they threw away his hair stuff, which caused to problems in Orlando and NYC. By now the gates should have closed. We should have stayed in London. We should not had made it to Ireland. But the plane was late. We made it, against all odds. We were exhausted and a bit delerious when we arrived in Dublin, but we arrived.