Saturday, July 08, 2006

Back home.

I got home yesterday (Friday) morning after the longest day of travelling i've ever had! I'll keep it short cause theres a lot.

It all started in Birmingham Airport at the check in desk. The lady decided to put me on an earlier flight to Atlanta to give me plenty of time to get my connection. The new flight was leaving in 10 minutes so I ran to get and they had just started boarding when I got there so it seemed like happy days. We began to push back from the terminal when all of a sudden we heard a bang. The bar between the airplane and the tractor thing that pushes us out broke and hit the landing gear. So we were brought back in and the pilots had a look at it and said it looked fine but just to be sure they called an engineer to look at it.

Now when i say engineer I dont mean any of the engineers that were already there, I mean the engineer that serviced the airplane the day before and who was staying in an airport the far side of the airport! So it took him a good 45 minutes to get over and while that was going on, all passengers who had connections had to go up to the terminal and see if they could change their connection. My flight to Ireland wasn't till 8.20 and this was only 4.00 so I was confident I would make it. The minute I stepped out of the door, my boarding pass was taken from me and I was offically deboarded off the plane with all my luggage still on it! I was then put in a queue to talk to an agent and no one was allowed back on the plane till everyone was taken care of.

The best bit of all this was the flight I was originally booked on was boarding RIGHT beside me AND LEFT ON TIME!!! So after another hour (now 5.00) we were aloud back on the plane and we left for Atlanta. So I still had a good hour and a half to get my flight to Dublin, which I made. It too left late because they had one guy there to board all the passengers. I got into my seat, sat back and had a good flight, despite the crap films and not being able to sleep!

Now if anyone has seen or read the Irish news recently, they probably know what happened next. Some idiot called in a hoax bomb scare in the arrivals area of Dublin Airport and caused the whole airport to shut down from 9.00am till around 10.30am. My flight arrived at 9.30am. Need I say more? We sat on the tarmac (the plane, not us individually) for 2 hours until we were aloud back into the terminal.

When we got there then it took me a good hour to get my bags because about 16 planes unloaded a lot of impatient, tired and generally pissed off passengers at the one time. Chaos is the only word for it. When I finally got my bag (which was lying on the floor), an announcement came over the system telling the passengers from some Ryanair flight that their bags were actually on belt 2, not belt 10. So there was a lot of cursing followed by a huge surge of people from on side of the baggage hall to the other, with me in the middle! When I finally got outside to where tha taxis are, the queue was massive. I would've been there for a long time! The easiest thing was to walk to the Great Southern Hotel and wait for Mum to pick me up. She was already nearby and it was easier than having to drive near to the airport building.

I didn't go to bed till close to 9 in the evening to try and get my clock back in order, so by then i'd been up almost 30 hours. I just got up an hour ago (2pm) and i'm all rested up and feeling much better.

I've put up a good few photos now but theres still more so keep an eye out for them.

Also i'm having some problem with the sidebar thats usually on the righthand side but for some reason is down at the bottom. If anyone has any ideas how to fix it PLEASE leave a comment.

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