Back to the Emerald Isle

Our trip to the US was great, but after 4 weeks away we were ready to go "home". So we headed to O'Hare airport with our 4 overweight suitcases and all of our carry-ons. The flight was scheduled to depart on a Saturday at 6:30 pm. Like good little travelers, we arrived 2 hours ahead of time. As we were waiting in the Aer Lingus line, we heard someone say that the flight had been delayed. When we finally got to the desk we were informed that the flight was delayed 7 hours due to technical issues and we would be leaving at 1:30am! Ugggh! We accepted the inevitable. Then Marco realized we had booked the tickets using American Express and he had enrolled in a travel delay protection program. You pay $10 each time you book a ticket and that turned out to be worth every penny! We called Am Ex and they told us that we could go to a hotel, eat, buy any incidental things we needed during the delay and it would all be covered. Luckily there was a hotel at the airport so we checked in, ordered room service and watched a movie. We also snuck in a little nap and a shower before heading back to the airport at midnight. This was a million times better than sitting in the airport for 7 hours! The flight to Dublin was uneventful, and we were scheduled to fly on to Shannon after a 45 minute stop. Shannon is less than half the distance to Galway than Dublin, so it's much more convenient. Well, when we arrived in Dublin they announced that the flight to Shannon had been canceled. Unbelievable. They wanted to put us all on a bus to Shannon, which would have taken several hours. Then we would have to take another bus to Galway for about an hour and a half. This did not sound fun. So we decided to take a train directly from Dublin to Galway, which was a whole adventure by itself. We took a bus for 45 minutes to the train station, lugging our bags all the way! Needless to say, we were pretty exhausted by the time we arrived home. We got home around 7pm, dumped our bags, ate some cereal and went to bed. We both had to work the next day, so we pushed through the jetlag. The crazy part is that we went straight from work back to the train station and headed back to Dublin. The next morning we had a 7am flight to Portugal!