On the way home

Wow wow wow. Just took my seat on the plane back to Philadelphia. The airport experience here in Dublin was remarkably arduous, even in the context of arduous airport experiences. It’s just a good thing nothing went wrong, or we never would have made the flight.

Once we got the shuttle bus from the hotel, we arrived at the airport at 9:35 for our 11:35 flight and then waited in line for:

1.  Initial passport check
2. Check in and baggage check. This from probably the least personable person I’ve encountered in the past two weeks. The one good thing is that the process was slow enough that I was able to offload about 10 excess pounds from my bag. My carry-on roller bag is by far the heaviest bag we have.
3. General Ireland security clearance, which meant belts off and computers out, but shoes on through the metal detector. After that we headed to what is called US Customs Preclearance, and to be honest the order of things is getting a little fuzzy for me (this happened within the past hour of writing this)
4. Another passport check
5. TSA Security clearance, which meant belts off again, shoes off this time but no need to empty pockets. Here I dealt with the rudest TSA person I’ve ever seen, not giving any instructions, answering questions in a clipped and abrupt manner, telling me to do this and that, and then fussing at me for not moving up because there were people waiting behind me. Oh really? There are other people on line behind me? I’m shocked. In Security Clearanceland, everyone knows that the person behind you is irrelevant. You need to get your stuff checked and you have no reason to dawdle. 
6. Passport kiosk land, where you scan your passport, answer questions about whether you were in contact with livestock, and leave with a slip.
7. Passport control. where our passports were checked again and our slips were taken.

At this point, I mentioned to Ronnie that we were done with Pre-clearance and wondered when Clearance on Post-Clearance would be like. She was not amused. And as we exited that last line, they announced boarding for our flight, so we queued up for that next, an finally got to our seats.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the screaming baby 3 rows behind us, but at least we don’t have to queue up to hear him. He has excellent screaming volume and stamina, even for a baby.