Ireland/England

I am lucky to work by LAX in a building that has a deal with Supershuttle to give us free rides to the airport.  My wife met me at work, I changed into comfortable jeans with no belt (one less thing to take off for security) and we waited for the shuttle. While it was fifeteen minutes late, we were the last stop and arrived at the airport 2 1/2 hours before our flight.  For some reason at LAX, American Airlines has a separate line for their London flight.  The line only took about 15 minutes to get to the counter, but our lady was seriously unbelieveably incompetent and inattentive.  I am not kidding but it took the lady 20 minutes to get us our boarding pass after we got to the counter.  While checking us in, she took a phone call and went to help another lady down the counter, leaving us in the middle of the check-in process. Luckily, there was absolutely no line at security and we got to the gate an hour before our flight. 

American Airlines had us on a 777 straight to London, which is a fairly big plane.  We had our own personal screen with movies, but I was going to try to sleep as much as possible.  I was going to do the Melatonin jet lag system, which is no alcohol, a lot of water and 5 grams of Melatonin, a natural hormone available at Whole Foods or other herb places, the first four nights before sleep. We got dinner and breakfast on the flight, which were pretty average.  I also watched "The Prestige" (not great, don't bother) before I slept fitfully the remainder of the flight. I slept close to 6 hours and felt pretty good, but our 2-year-old daughter, Rachel, slept the whole flight after the first 2 hours, which was great! 

They had to reroute our flight over northern Canada due to a storm in the midwest, which resulted in us arriving an hour late in London.  This delay caused us to only have a 1 hour and 10 minutes to get through customs in Heathrow and security in Terminal 1.  We were worried that we would miss our BMI flight to Dublin.

The flight attendants had told us that we did not need to fill out the form since we were going to Ireland, but that turned out wasn't the case.  There was only our plane at immigration, and when the guard saw our daughter we rushed to the front of the line, which was even better.  Of course, when we got to the immigration officer, we did not have the form, but they let us fill it out right there, which was cool.  We had to get our luggage and then get to Terminal 1 before the half-hour deadline for checked  luggage on BMI.  We had about 25 minutes to do that at this point.  We walked real fast through the tunnel to Terminal 1, which was not as long as I thought it was going to be (it only took about 5 minutes.)  We had printed out our boarding passes for Dublin online before we even left the USA, which worked out as BMI has an express bag drop for Online check.  We made it with 15 minutes to spare.  There was another long line in security at Terminal 1, but we made it through to Gate 80 about 5 minutes before boarding on BMI.

We had an A320, which is like a Southwest plane, and BMI staff seemed great.  We left maybe 5 minutes late, but made up time in the air.  BMI makes you pay for your drinks and snacks, but a ginger ale was only  .60 pounds, about $1 or so, not bad because our fare was with tax was only $55/each.

We landed in Dublin about 4:30PM local time.  We got our luggage and headed out to take the Aircoach bus (google it).  The bus was directly across from the baggage claim and was loading when we arrived. We were one of the last people to get on.   The bus took us to City Centre, dropping us off at the gate of Trinity College.  We had a map from Trinity College to our hotel, Jury's Inn Christchurch.  It didn't look like too long of a walk, but the bus dropped us off into mass chaos since it was rush hour. I have never seen so many people walking around a city. There was literally almost no room to get around the people walking.  The bags were heavy (probably 70lbs.) and even though they rolled, the side walk was not conducive to rolling well. After much cursing the uphill walk to the hotel, our journey was finally over and I felt great!