Flashback Friday

I am leaving today for my weekend trip to the Ring of Kerry.  To make up for the lack of posts this weekend I thought I would share with you the craziest experience of my time abroad so far; Matt's flight home.

To start from the beginning, my flight home in December was at 4:15pm.  At the time there were only two flight options to choose from, 11:30am or 4:15pm.

Fast forward a month Matt and I travelled back to Ireland, Spain, and then back to Ireland.  His flight was on Tuesday, January 13th from Dublin.  We were already in Dublin, and they recommend that you get to an international flight three hours before departure so he did not have to be at the airport until around 1.

I woke up early that morning and saw Seton off at 7am because she was taking the earlier flight, and then went back to the hotel room to catch a few more hours of sleep before Matt's departure.  I wanted to let him sleep as long as possible because I told him he was not allowed to sleep on the flight so that he could fight the reverse jet lag.  I finally woke him up at 11:30am and we gathered all of our belongings and checked out of the hotel.

We had some time to spare so we went downstairs to the hotel's restaurant so we could grab something to eat before he left.  This is a crucial piece of information to the story; because we were in the hotel we both had wifi on our phones.  If we had not, I do not want to think about what would have happened.

Shortly after ordering our meals Matt receives a text from my mom telling Matt that she will see him in Boston at 4pm.  After he reads this aloud to me I quickly respond with and exasperated, "Tell mom she has it wrong, your flight leaves Ireland at 4, you arrive in Boston at 6". Immediately she responds with a text saying "No, his flight leaves Ireland at 2, and arrives in Boston at 4".

It is now 12:45pm and we are sitting in Dublin's city centre.

I have never been more panicked in my life.  Apparently, after the first of the year the flight schedule had changed and the 4pm flight now left at 2pm.  Looking back at it now, someone (probably me) should have not only double checked the time of the flight, but maybe checked it at all.

So we run out of the restaurant, luckily our food had not come so we were not dining and dashing, and because the Irish people are so nice when they heard what was going on, and saw the look on my face, they told us not to worry and just to get on our way.

We rush out of the hotel and I rip open the driver's door of the first taxi that I see and ask the man how quickly he can get us to the airport.  He responds, "quickly".  I tell him that we need his answer to be two hours ago, but seeing as that is not possible we settle for as fast as possible.

His answer is the best part of the whole story, he said, "I live for this kind of thing".

Matt and I are then thrust into the world of Jason Bourne. The driver is speeding, swerving, moving through lanes, cars, and barriers.  At one point he even jerks down a back alley and emerges on the other side of the road.  He also found the situation completely amusing continuously asking whose fault the mishap was.  That would be me sir, please stop laughing. *note* The seat belts in the back of the car were broken so it really was as dangerous as it sounds.

He manages to get us there in a record breaking 24 minutes placing our time of arrival at the airport to be 1:15.

We rush to the counter and checked Matt in; there was no line because everyone else had gotten there an appropriate amount of time before the flight.  The man behind the counter told us not to worry, now that Matt was checked in he would make his flight.  Even though this was nice to hear, we were so panicked it did not do much to settle all of the adrenaline that was running through my body.

Matt and I then ran to the first security check where it occurred to me that I had about five seconds to say goodbye to my brother for the next five months. But, no matter how rushed we were, I still made him give me a hug in public because that is what older sisters do. Being the pro that he is, Matt made it through both Irish and American security in about 30 minutes.

I have never been so surprised or relieved as when I got that text from him saying, "At my gate".

At this point I was on the phone with my mom because from our obvious lack of knowledge about the time of his flight she had figured out what was going on. We decided that it would be best not to tell dad this story until Matt had safely landed in America, if ever.

I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this story, but the moral is that everything eventually was okay so I didn't look for them.