Celestial Navigation

(Note from Scott: Due the length of the story, this is part 1 of my trip over to Dublin. It will cover leaving home to touching down in London Heathrow Airport. Part 2 will cover going through London Heathrow Airport to the arrival at the residential hall in Dublin All times listed in both posts are local times.)

Well, for this trip, I was expecting to get held up in many places. Mainly delays in Boston, London, or even Dublin itself. When I was leaving home on Tuesday, it was a nice wonderful day and it was going to look that way all the way through when I took off. From what it sounds like, if I was leaving the next day, I would have issues with snow/crappy weather. My mom and I got organized and mostly packed Monday night. Then, on Tuesday itself, I woke up early (9 am) in hopes of being tired for when I get on the overnight flight to London. I finished up packing that day, after watching some TV and surfing the net. Once my mom got back, we both made sure I had everything and zipped up my bags. My dad arrived back from teaching school and then we all drove down to the airport. My mom warned me in advance that she would cry a bit when they would drop me off. We were a bit early to the airport after I checked in, so we found a few seats and I ate most of a not so great salad from Starbucks. When I checked in, the woman at the counter put the ticket on the bag. I asked her if I needed to pick it up in Heathrow and basically check in again. She told us that the bag would go right through, even though I was changing airlines. Good news for me. She also mentioned that I would not need to go through customs and all that. I got even more excited that my connection would be easy. Nothing like some good old fassion easy travel. I got through security just fine with no issues and waved bye to my parents. I was going to sit down and blog here on details to this point, but the wireless internet decided to be lame at Logan so I didn't. I went down to the gate where my flight was leaving out of, took a seat and listened to my Ipod for a bit. There was this very cute little baby who seemed very excited. The dad said that travel doesn't really seem to bother the baby at all. Which is a good thing I guess is a good thing. They were heading out on the flight leaving for L.A. in the gate next to mine. I got onto my flight shortly after and was sitting next to a guy who was from England but now lives in New Hampshire. We somehow got on the topic of soccer (oh, wait, it's called Football here in Ireland). It was aparent he knew more than me (not hard thing to do considering the topic) and so I was asking the questions mainly. The flight was fairly uneventful. There was a fair amount of turbulance early on in the flight with little bit later on. Nothing really interesting to say about the flight itself really. Since it was an overnight flight, I would arrive in London on what would be the next day (just before 7 AM), I wanted to basically get some sleep as to help with jet lag. Well, I was sitting right next to the window and my seat was not far behind the wing, so engine noise was loud, and sitting in coach, space was very limited. In a few attempts to get some sleep, usually didn't work as well as I had hoped. I may have gotten some level of sleep, but it was really hard to tell since there was noeasy to see clock. Once they started bringing breakfast around, I decided that any chance of sleep for a while was gone. I got bit of coffee (I am basically a tea drinker, but considering the situtation, I went with coffee). As the flight got in, I asked the guy sitting next to me, if I would need to go through custums and all that. He told me that if I needed to go to a different terminal, I would. We were landing in terminal 3 and I needed to get to terminal 1. So, there goes the super wicked easy way to travel, but luckily I had a good amount of time ahead of me. There were screens that were showing where we were. At around this time, we were over Ireland. It was still dark out, but I could see little pockets of light. They might have been towns or shopping areas, but I wasn't sure. Once we getting into London, there was some seriouse fog (anyone else hear of this London fog stuff?), but once we actually landed, the fog was cleared. As we got off, I said bye to the guy sitting next to me and started into the adventure that was London Heathrow Airport.

With peace and love,
Scott Miley

(Part 2 will be published later today. It will have from Heathrow to arrival in residence hall in Dublin.)