The Irish Experience - Part One

In the lead up to this event we kept saying to each other , “let’s just get on the plane and then we can relax.” There had been a heap of organising to do with the regular travel stuff like passports, packing and planes booked. Then there was the fundraiser which was a great success but again took a bit of time. So sitting on the plane taxiing out at Tulla we were pretty excited and very relieved to be on our way. Little did we know about the nightmare that was only hours away called ‘Heathrow’.

The idea was to connect to a flight to Dublin, bags were ticketed to go there, we just had to board the plane. Simple. Check in lady asks, “where’s you baggage receipts?” “Ahhh, ‘scuse me? WTF did you just say? We have no receipts.” Thanks a whole heap, grumpy Qantas check in dude all the way back in Melbourne. Ok......one problem we can handle. 2^nd problem related to the first, we miss our connecting flight and have to wait 5 hours for the next one. Attepted solution = find bags. Mis-guided strategy, split up....Seb goes to the Qantas desk, Jo and I go to terminal 3 then 4 to check baggage claim. Not since the Brady Bunch hit Hawaii had there been such a debacle.

After a couple of hours talking to a million different dis-interested people we get confirmation that the bags are on the next plane so we return to the check in desk to wait for Seb. Time ticks away and still no Seb. We try to ring him but haven’t got his number for his international sim card. We ring home to get his number via pay phone and credit card cause we have no cash. 3 calls home I later find out = $100 but it don’t matter because we have the digits. I ring on my phone and can’t get through. I try again and my phone runs out of juice. We later find out Seb had tried to call us but had also run out of juice. I try to charge my phone but don’t have a European adapter. What now???

Really getting desperate as the possibility of missing the second flight becomes all too real. We have been through the scanner half a dozen times as we’ve been in and out of terminals for what seems like an eternity. So Jo and I go to the final check in point before the departure gates. I go through, she stays on the other side. I run down to gate 7 & 8 and then gate 86, because departure has been shifted. It’s seriously about a km to these gates. In my panic, I see no Seb. I run back, sweating. Jo looks at me hoping to see something different than my ‘sorry no Seb shrug of the shoulders’. The girl at the check in changes shifts with another and I ask the new girl if there is anyway to tell if Seb has gone through yet. She says sure we can check through hundreds of photos of everyone thats passed by. We start this process as Jo rushes out again to check for him at get someone to page him through the terminal. Only thing is Heathrow has 5 terminals which are bus rides apart and can’t be reached by a single page. Also real handy like, was the fact that the page can’t be heard in departure gates either, which is where Seb has been sitting for the last two hours. He had people paging for us in there but we couldn’t here him either from where we were.  At this stage I reckon we have less than ten minutes to find Seb, run the km to the correct gate and get on the plane. Start looking at photos and nothing for a few minutes. I say to the girl he will be in an Australian tracksuit. She stops and says, he’s in. She remembered him going through on her earlier shift. This girl never does a double shift but today she did for some fantastic reason. So we’ve got him but Jo still hasn’t come back and I can’t check back out to get her. After 5 hours, 5 minutes to go!

Finally Jo appears from around the corner and we run. We were the last people on the plane and there was probably other passengers looking at us thinking what a bunch of losers, can’t even organise themselves to be on time for a flight. We sat down, I ordered a beer, Jo a vodka and Seb tried to tell us how much of a mission he’d been through himself. Sorry pal, nothing doing. Admittedly we’d all been through the Heathrow ringer but his ultra marathon was Saturday, we’d just done ours through the terminals of hell.