pat loughery

Here’s my journal entry for the first two travel days for the Celtic Trail class:

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Thursday and Friday – Travel Days

 

I left Seattle early Thursday morning.  My trip hadn’t gotten off to the best of starts; after frantically looking for the key to my car in which I had a couple of bags of newly purchased clothes and bathroom supplies for the trip on Wednesday night, I realized that I had locked my only key to my car on the car seat.   I had to call a tow truck to unlock the car through the window.  Five minutes and $75 later, and I had my keys, new clothes and bathroom supplies ready to throw into my suitcase.

 

The flight from Seattle to New Jersey was uneventful, except that the plane was delayed in the air for half an hour.  When we landed the pilot told us that another flight had declared an emergency, which meant that arriving flights were all to remain in the air until the first one was handled. 

 

The problem for me was that I had a tight connection window, although I wasn’t worried.  When I left the plane, however, no airline personnel were on hand to direct me to the next gate, and the banks of video screens which show gates for each flight were out of service.  I wandered until I found another gate attendant.  When I asked her where the flight to Belfast was departing from, she told me that it had left five minutes earlier.

 

I ran through the airport to try to reach the flight, just in case.  When I arrived at the gate, the plane was still connected to the jet way, but no counter personnel were there.  I ran to the next gate over, and asked them to get on the flight.  The counter person there rudely told me that they had been paging me, and I obviously hadn’t been listening, so they weren’t going to reopen the door.  They sent me to the customer service desk.

 

At this point, I was devastated.  I had wanted to spend a day in Belfast acclimating to the time change and exploring the city, taking photographs of what I found.  This would mean that I would be rushing into the city just in time to start class, and wouldn’t have time on my own to explore a portion of Ireland I’ve never visited.  The customer service agent was very helpful, and offered to move back my return date a day if I’d like – an offer I accepted immediately.  I received a hotel voucher and meal vouchers, and was directed to the hotel shuttle area.

 

I spent one hour and 45 minutes in the hotel shuttle area waiting for my shuttle.  I called the hotel four times in this timeframe, and each time they either told me that the shuttle would be there in 10-15 minutes, or that it was on the way.  Once I saw the shuttle for the hotel drive though the pickup area, so I ran after it, but it didn’t stop.

 

When it finally stopped, a mass of people in a similar situation to me boarded, filling every inch of the bus.  Apparently our airline had several booking problems that day, and  fifty or more people were being put up in a hotel.  After a confusing dropoff – the bus stopped at a different hotel than our vouchers named, but told us we were in the right location – we all checked into our rooms.  I was told they were out of non-smoking rooms and was given a smoking room, and I sat down around midnight, after a 15 hour travel day.  It wasn’t a peaceful day.

 

On Friday, I left the hotel at noon checkout and went to the airport.  I was happy to find electrical plug-ins and free wireless internet there and spent until that evening’s flight at a restaurant, then a coffee shop, and then the waiting area, before boarding my flight and sleeping as much as possible before arrival.

 

I used the time to finish Ian Bradley’s book The Celtic Way, which I had saved for the flight to Belfast because it had appeared to be a central book for this course.  Several other books that I had previously read referenced this one, and I wanted to savor what appeared to be a major and important work as close to arrival as possible.  In retrospect, it may have been wiser to read that one first, and then see how the others built upon its content, as it wasn’t all that unique from the five or six books that I’d read prior to it.