Jiggity Jig.

To market,
To market,
To buy a fat pig.
Home again,
Home again,
Jiggity jig.

We are home again, after a long travel day. We gained 6 time zones, making it a 30 hour day for us, so we pushed and stayed awake long enough to go to bed at a regular time, and we both had a great night’s sleep.

The day started in Haarlem, where we took an Uber to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. We did not pack lightly for this trip, and decided we’d had enough of lugging our luggage around city streets and finding places for it on trains and buses, etc. Our Uber driver was friendly and engaging, which I’d have to say is different than our recent experiences at home, where they are always talking to someone else on their phone, etc.

A Study in Contrasts

We arrived at the airport about 3.5 hours before our flight, not because we love spending time in airports, but because we had to check bags, and wanted to be extra sure that we would have plenty of time for that + security + ???. On the left, you can see the British Airways desk, where there are half a dozen agents and no line. We, on the other hand, were in the Aer Lingus line (right image), where there were 50+ customers waiting and zero agents. they are supposed to open the desk 3 hours before a flight, and we just imagined that there would be more flights coming and going, but perhaps not. In any case, 2 agents arrived about 2.5 hours before our flight, and the line moved just fine at that point. We were glad to be pretty close to the front of the line, though.

To get us in the mood for our (brief) visit to Ireland, we ate lunch at the Murphy’s Irish Pub in Schiphol Airport. The first leg of our trip took us from Amsterdam to Dublin. They boarded from both ends of the plane, so we got to walk out on the tarmac, and up the “airstairs” to the rear entrance to the plane, and I was able to get these much-closer-than-usual photos of our plane.

We had a couple hours of layover in Dublin, and when flying to the U.S. from there, they have it set up so that you can go through customs at the departing airport, and then fly in to a domestic gate, and go to normal baggage claim, and head out directly from there. So that’s what we did, and that all went without a hitch. The lines were long, but they kept moving.

Our flight, which left a few minutes late, arrived a little early. Turns out our bags made the flight as well, so there was a happy reunion in Boston, and then we took an Uber home, and got in around 7:30, ending an uneventful but long day of travel.