Tuesday 15 July 2008

Air Dingus

On Sunday morning, we closed the suitcases (and no one had to sit on them) and prepared to leave Jouy. S visited the boulangerie one last time to try out his french language skills. Apparently it was very busy so he had quite an audience.
We tidied up the apartment and walked to the station to catch our train. We'd left plenty of time so we started planning on all the things we could do at the airport (shopping and eating). When we got to CDG we caught a little shuttle train to our terminal and went to find our check in. There were huge queues but they seemed to be for an earlier flight to Cork so we debated what to do. We decided to join the queue so we could get rid of the bags. Over and hour and a half later we were nearing the head of the queue. We were hungry, Jack was grumpy. We couldn't understand why it would take so long. Then we watched the woman checking in the family in front of us. The maximum weight was 20kg and one of their bags was 700g over this weight. So while everyone waited she made them open their bags and take out 700g of stuff. We were understandably nervous. Jack's bag was below the twenty but ours were over so off they came while we swapped stuff between the bags and the people in the queue glared at us (their turn would come). We finally got checked in (we'd arrived around 1pm, our plane left at 3.50pm and it was now about 3.10!) and staggered off without our boarding passes. After getting those we tried to go through to the gate but a smart ass told us that we needed another boarding pass for Jack unless S wanted to stay behind so back we went to the desk. By this stage we didn't have long before the flight was due to leave and there were large groups of students travelling on our flight so we decided to get food at the gate and hotfooted it. We had the usual fun at security, removing belts, shoes and getting out the camera and DVD and laptop anf folding the stroller and carrying Jack and then putting it all back together. And of course we got to the gate and the flight was delayed for an hour so we sat and I ate a very expensive sandwich.
There was a guy sitting next to us who looked very unimpressed by Jack's capering, even when Jack flashed him the winning smile. When we finally got on the flight he was the one sitting next to us. You can imagine how happy he was!
Finally getting to Dublin we got a taxi to our apartment and had dinner and went to bed, all worn out. It's funny the flight was only for an hour but seemed to take the whole day. On the phone the next day Mum and Dad asked what Ireland was like and I had to say I wasn't sure.

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