For James and Victor, the travels started Thursday, April 26th at Detroit Metro Airport (DTW). We arrived at DTW a bit later than expected but where told our flight on American Airlines was a bit late (moved from 5 PM to 6:10 PM EDT) and there might be trouble for our connecting flight in Chicago (at 7 PM CDT).
We arrived in Chicago at about 6:15 PM CDT and rushed to the Air Lingus terminal. By the time we got to the gate, the flight had left about five minutes before. An extremely helpful woman at the American Airlines ticket counter got us on stand-by for a 9 PM American Airlines flight to London with an Air Lingus connection to Dublin at 1:30 PM the next afternoon. (If we didn’t make this standby flight, we wouldn’t leave Chicago until 5 PM Friday and then not get into Dublin until 9 AM Sunday, which would strand John in Dublin, alone for 2 days and without a hotel since all the reservations where in my name.)
Luckily, we got onto the 9 PM flight to London, which wasn’t really a bad flight. We arrived in London Heathrow at about 12 PM GMT on Friday, about an hour to make our connecting flight. James’ disability got us through the massively long wait to go through the security checkpoint line for international departures without any delay and we arrived at the Air Lengus gate with about 15 minutes to spare. When we gave our tickets, we were told we were not scheduled for the1:30 PM flight and where instead on a 4:50 PM flight to Dublin. We made some phone calls to John and the guesthouse we had reservations at and were able to get him checked in to the room and James and I hunkered down for our next flight.
The flight to Dublin went with out a hitch ticket wise but there was a bit of a delay on the runway. We arrived in Dublin at about 6:25 PM GMT. But the Fates had one more trick for us. Our bags were still in Chicago or London maybe even Istanbul for all we knew. Air Lingus put a tracer on them and they should be delivered to us at the guesthouse soon. Air Lingus gave us a nice dop kit with toiletries, a t-shirt, and surprisingly a pair of underwear.
James and I bought tickets for a double-decker bus from the Dublin airport to the stop nearest to where we where staying and then walked a short bit to the guesthouse, finally meeting up with John. It was about 8 PM GMT and after a long day of travels, none of us where up for anything much so we just got food from a Chinese take-away and some drinks and holed up for the night.
All this is a bit tame compared to the real experiences and we’ll post an audio of James’ more colorful commentary on our flight experiences and John’s own travel nightmares and his solo tour of Dublin later.
