Ahh… the thrill of international travel. The excitement of knowing you will soon be in a foreign country, but first you have to get there. Wednesday morning started at the Sanctuary Resort to a lovely wake up call at 5:30am and the sudden realization that I had had too much to drink the night before. Hangovers are bad enough without the prospect of flying.

Large bottle of water in hand, Jason and I found our way to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (thank you Dave!). With six pieces of luggage in tow, we found the line for American Airlines (our connection to Chicago for Aer Lingus) about 2 miles later we found the end of the line. Almost 2 hours and 10 feet later, we had a stroke of luck. The guy in front of us was on the same flight and was also catching an international connection, and he was jumping line. So we followed…..(at this point I should mention it is about 25 minutes before our flight is supposed to take off). The counter was taking all international travelers priority and within 5 minutes we had our tickets and luggage checked in.

Next, the security line. In case anyone is interested, TSA does not allow cutting to the front of the line, but as the nice man put it “I cannot refuse anyone”. This meant to me, jump into the VIP traveler line and smile nicely to the TSA guy. It worked. We made the gate just as it was boarding, whew. Chicago here we come.

Well the bottleneck we experienced in Phoenix was about to reverberate. American Airlines had to cancel flights out of its hub in Dallas and had consequently mucked up all travel. When we arrived in Chicago (late) we had to change terminals (via airport metro) and boarded our flight to Dublin with no sitting down, no relaxing breath, no moment of contemplation, actually it was more of running on to our flight. Finally, sit down and chill for 10 hours. We definitely chilled….at about 30 degrees. That was the temperature inside the plane! Earmuffs and thermal socks would have been nice, but alas just a flimsy airline blanket. Besides the cold it was a nice flight as I remember going in and out of a Lorazepam slumber.

Welcome Dublin. Where we had to go through passport control and customs and then walk to Galway (or so it seemed) to catch another flight. The Dublin airport is under heavy construction and very confusing, I felt a little like a mouse in a maze. Onto Barcelona, ole! This was actually the easiest part of our travel, we of course had to go through immigration and customs again, but I just flashed my EU passport and got a noncommital wave through from the immigration officer. Customs was one guy with his back turned arguing with some passenger. Everyone around us saw this as an opportunity to go as quickly as possible through this room (we followed).

So we are here and now resting comfortably in our new pad. More on that later….

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 8:46 am by Corrie and is filed under Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.