The Big Adventure to The Emerald Isle

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Thank goodness we chose to fly this long haul trip on a Business Class ticket. Having left NZ at 10pm local time, it was some 33 hours later before we finally checked into our hotel in Dublin. The beds on board the plane were really comfortable and we slept well on the Auckland/LA haul. What a rude awakening it was though going through the US entry to transit to the next part of the journey. The fingerprinting is very us informative and we had no idea what was required of us and the young lady behind the unsmiling face was certainly going to leave me to guess what was required. Once I realised, she unsmilingly used the minimum number of words to relay her further requests. As we moved on to the body X-ray machine, I was singled out to stand aside while John was allowed to go through. I had a complete body "pat down" followed by my hands being swabbed with a piece of cardboard which was then fed into a scanner to make sure, I am now told, that they did not carry any gun powder residue!! After a two hour stop over in the Transit area we were off again on the next leg of the journey to London. Sleep eluded us both on this leg so I was very glad to reach Heathrow. Lovely smiling and helpful people greeted us in this airport where we did our immigration entry into UK. We were able to go to the Lounge area here and get some nice food and have a relax before catching the British Airways flight for Dublin. However after boarding the plane we were unable to take off as a passenger had been disallowed to board but his/her luggage had been loaded, so time was spent having to search the hold to find said baggage and offload it before we could take off. Consequently, our arrival in Dublin was three quarters of an hour late and we had no driver waiting to take us to our hotel! Well, what a schomozzle we had trying to get picked up! After many phone calls and being constantly told he would only be "another 15 minutes" he finally turned up 3 hours late! I was absolutely dead on my feet and feeling frantic I was so tired. Turns out that we had arrived in Dublin on the day of the National Hurling final in Dublin and of course the traffic in Dublin was totally gridlocked as 80,000 fans were leaving the stadium following the game. Our poor driver had no show of getting to us, but I do think he could've been more truthful about the "15 minutes" each time he was contacted! As a result of this messy arrival, we completely missed the first day of our tour, which included an orientation of Dublin and a reception to meet all our fellow travellers. More to come soon..

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