A little flight attendant lingo....

Well it's been a long 26 hours....where shall I start??

I guess I should start by telling you that we had decided to start our trip in Dublin. Although this was a pretty spontanious trip, we had booked a rental car and B&B in Ireland giving ourselves two days to get there. Sounded like a great idea, and plenty of time for travel woes as we would be flying standby. What I did NOT take into account is the the fact that Notre Dame and Navy are playing a football game in Dublin this coming weekend. So for those of you that have never flown standyby this means that pretty much all flights leaving from the East coast to Dublin are going to be full with "paying" passengers, and that standby was going to be a long shot!

Renee and I were dropped off at the airport yesterday (8/25) at approx 3:30pm. We were pretty confident as we had 4 flights to get us close to Dublin. I had came to the realilzation that we probably would not make Dublin, and came up with alternate routes such as getting to Manchester or Heathrow and taking the Ferry to Dublin. The excitment of our trip and our friendship must have got us thru the first night..the first flight we attempted was Dublin. We get to the gate and they start boarding the aircraft. We know at this point that it is going to be a long shot. About halfway thru the boarding process the gate agent comes across the PA and announces they are goinng to stop the boarding process, that there is a problem with the air conditioning, and they are going to bring matinenance out. (As a flight attendant, I know this is bad in many ways: #1 being the flight could be cancelled #2 gives revenue (paying)passengers more time to get to the gates, thus lessening the chance for us to get on...We immediately get up and start walking to the Manchester flight. This is our second best option. We sit there as patiently as we can and watch as the flight fills and our names stay at the bottom of the standyby list, only to hear the gate agent announce the flight is full. Cool, at this point Dublin has a new depature time. We go back to the Dublin gate, to only watch that flight fill up and the gate agent announce that the flight is full. Okay, at this point the stress level is pretty high, but we are still on our game, we still have two chances to make it to London as there are two Heathrow flight leaving. We go to each of those gates only to watch our name stay at the bottom of the stanby list, by the last flight we are saying a little prayer to the standby angels... Obviously they were busy as Renee and I did not make any flight on the first day..4 flights, and we are still sitting in the Atlanta airport.

At this point it is almost 11pm. We could have went home and slept, but we made a decision to stay in the airport. We had already gone thru security, we did not want to unpack our bags, and we knew if we went home we would only get about 6hours sleep anyway. So yes, we made concourse F the hotel de Katie and Renee! We went to the batroom, changed into out Pj's washed our face brushed our teeth and prepared to sleep on the floor.

We made a cozy spot on the floor around midnight and we woke up around 6am freezing!!! When I say freezing, I mean freezing. So cold that I waited for Brookstone to open around 7am only to pay $50 for a blanket and pillow combo. My nose and feet were so cold that I was willing to cuddle and share blankets at some point during the night. So cold that Renee was rocking this look, and I was rocking socks with flip flops. So COLD that you get the point.

We get up around 10am and head to the bathroom to get "refreshed" to start the day. We have hot tea, lunch and regroup. I have figured out by looking at the map that we just need to get somewhere in Europe and soon, as Hurricane Issac is moving in soon. I start looking at ALL options to get us to the other continent. It seems after looking at all the flights that Brussels, Belgium is going to be our best chance. I had downloaded an app on my Ipad called Skyscanner (that will check any flight going from one destination to another and give you all flight options and send you to the booking website. On a side note a great app for frequent travelers) and realized that once we arrrived in Belgium we could stay the night, explore, and then buy a ticket on Air Lingus farily resonable and get us to Dublin, and only be a day off track.

So Renee and I book for Brussels! We think that it is our best option, but after talking to the customer service agent, she looks at us and shakes her head. Seems as if today might be a repeat of last night, and at this point, I think that I might be getting to old for this spontanious "standby" stuff! We sit and wait, and inbetweeen waiting we her that there is going to be a Church service in the chapel at 200pm..We go,and we are the only two people there. Needless to say, we are the last 2 standbys to get on to Brussels, in Economy plus at that!! Cheers to persistence!!

 

 

and just some fun pics from the plane!!!

Til next time, Peace and Love ~KT~

 

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