luck 'o' the irish...

Well, after a rousing few days in the NYC/Jersey area with friends and family of Billy's, we finally headed to the LaGuardia airport on Monday to catch our flight to Shannon, Ireland. We checked in only to discover that because Billy did not have a specific seat assigned to him and the flight to Philly, he'd be forced to fly standby. Nevermind that we'd made the reservation 1.5 months ago! (Philly is only a 40 minute hop, which was equi-distant from Billy's mom's house at NYC, and we'd have preferred to get on the flight there, were it not for the $200 change fee to miss the first leg of our flight) So, we waited for most of the others to board. I was waiting with Billy to make sure he'd get on the flight, when they announced that due to the number of folks and the amount of luggage on the little commuter jet, no more passengers would be allowed on board, as they'd exceeded the weight restriction. Suddenly neither of us had a seat on the flight! Along with 7 other folks who also were connecting to international flights (as we imagine all the others on the plane were, too - who goes through the hassle of luggage, security, etc, just for a short 2 hr or less drive?), we were a bit irate at the prospect of missing our connection to Ireland. But, never fear! Because we'd been involuntarily booted, we got a FREE LIMO RIDE to the Newark airport, where we hopped on a direct flight to Shannon with another airline (at USAirway's expense), AND we got free roundtrip vouchers for anywhere in the US. Our flight arrived to Shannon before our bags, which had already been loaded onto the other plane did (we found out that the original flight we'd been scheduled on was delayed an additional 3 hours and were glad we'd been booted after all). At first it seemed like it would be a hassle to get our bags back, but instead it freed us up to take the bus straight up to Galway to meet up with Billy's family, and let us wander around the cobbled narrow streets without carrying our backpacks. The airline brought them straight to the house that evening. Ireland was short and sweet... we'll write more later.
Countryside between Galway and Dublin:
Dublin sunset, below

Wingman and Bear have begun to get acquainted




Check out the Dublin airport en route to Berlin - this was at 4:30 am!