Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Terrible Thursday. ♥ 4:30 AM
Thursday, July 16th - The day we leave for Ireland...
Thursday morning we woke up for work feeling exhausted from our lack of sleep the previous night. We dragged ourselves along with our duffel bags packed for our weekend trip to Ireland to work and Claire and I spent the day working on spreadsheets. At about 5 Sara, the only person there besides us interns, told us that we could leave to make sure that we made our flights - especially since we weren't doing anything important.
So Claire and I got on the tube and headed to the Victoria train station where we bought our tickets on the Gatwick Express and waited for Linden who had to run hom
e after work because she forgot her passport. Looking back on it, we should have known then and there it was going to be a terrible day.Once Linden got there, we grabbed some food and went to the platform to wait for the train. A minute or so later they announced that due to the fact that a person had died on the train tracks all trains were being diverted to the London Bridge train station. So at about 6:30 we had to get back on the tube and go to the London Bridge station along with hundreds of other people. It was a very cramped trip, and when we got off we dashed to the first train we saw headed out to Gatwick. For some reason, the train sat there for about 45 minutes to an hour before leaving and then it was about a 45 minute train ride. We ended up getting to Gatwick Airport at about 8:30 and our flight was at 9:15.
We hurried over to security and when we got to the front he looked at our tickets and said we needed to go stand in another long line first to get a "visa check" which turned out to be some guy writing okay on our boarding pass. Finally having made it through our visa check and security it was about 8:50, just when our plane was supposed to start boarding so we stood in front of the board to wait and see what gate it would be at. Unfortunatley, it couldn't tell us and said it would announce it in 10 more minutes. 10 more minutes turned into our flight being delayed until 10:30. Left with no other option for food, the three of us headed upstairs to have some delicious McDonalds for dinner. It is slightly different than in America, but still not delicous by any means...
Well just as we were finishing a meal, our gate showed up on the board and said it was boarding soon so we headed down over there. We got on the plane with no problem, which we were somewhat concerned about because the agent at STA made a big deal about how RyanAir has very small carry on size limits. Once on the plane and steated, they made everyone get out their boarding passes and delayed us further because they thought there were extra people on the plane (RyanAir doesn't do assigned seating, you just sit where you can. Oh the joys of discount airlines!). Once they finally got it sorted out we move out onto the runway, where we proceeded to sit for another hour or two - I've lost count by this point - due to bad weather.
We landed in Dublin at 1 AM and by this point, the bus that we were supposed to take to the area of our hostel had stopped running. Luckily we caught someone at the service desk just as they were about to leave and they directed us to another bus that went to the same spot. So 2 AM and we get off of the bus and find ourselves needing to walk around Dublin to find our hostel. We went the wrong direction for a minute or five, but then turned around and after about a 15 minute walk managed to find it.
However, upon giving the man behind the desk our booking reciept from STA he told us he couldn't find us on the reservation list. We nearly burst into tears considering that it was now 2:30 AM, we'd had no sleep the night before and couldn't handle one more thing going wrong. After about 5 minutes, he did indeed manage to find our reservation and we were given our keys and I fell asleep nearly as soon as my head hit the pillow.
Back to my paper! I will, slowly but surely, get this blog caught up I promise!
The End.