Homeward …

… bound.

I was really wishing for a smooth trip home but that wasn’t to be. But we made it in the end and that’s all that’s important.

As we had an early flight home our wake up alarm was set for 4:30 am this morning.  This gave us plenty of time to have some coffee in the hotel and get the rest of our things packed up.  We had returned the car rental last night after our dinner with Dolly so that was already taken care of.   And since the hotel is literally only steps away from the airport it didn’t take us long to get there.

But that’s when it started going south.  Check in was fairly easy but it did take some time as the attendant had to key in some missing information for us before printing out our boarding passes. Thankfully at that time of morning it wasn’t too busy. 

After getting our boarding passes and checking through our checked bags we were told to register for the wheelchair assistance. And just like at Newark Airport when we left this was a hassle.  There were no assistants available so we waited for some time before decided to venture out on our own again.  The lovely woman at the desk directed us to the right location and we were off … Richard pushing the wheelchair again.  We have never had such a hard time with this service in the past as we did on this trip. Sigh.

Anyway … we made it through security without incident and tried to find our gate.  The only problem was we didn’t know the flight gate number.  What we didn’t realize was the gate numbers aren’t assigned until about 30 minutes before the flight time!  We have never encountered this procedure at any of the other airports we have flown out of!  It was crazy!  And just added to my stress level.

We were told to go to the “departure lounge” to watch the departure board for our gate assignment to show up.  Which is what we did … but only after we got something to eat and some coffee.  As it turned out we had plenty of time for this as our flight was an hour late taking off.  This only added more stress as we had a connecting flight in Dublin to catch for our flight to Newark, NJ.  But, thankfully we made it to Dublin in time to catch our connection and we were soon on our way home.

Ironically our flight from Dublin to Newark got in an hour early!  But then the wait for our checked bags took forever … nearly an hour.  After getting our bags we got our shuttle van to the off-site parking where we left our car. 

And then an hour and half later we were finally home … arriving at 6:15 pm EDT which felt like 11:15pm British time!  We dropped our luggage at home, said hello to Kiera and Cheddar and headed back out to grab a late supper.   

When we got back home we unpacked the suitcases and then it was an early bedtime for us both as we were exhausted.