Day One: Adventures in the Airport

It's 1:37 AM Eastern. We should be somewhere over the Pond, sound (?) asleep, on the way to Dublin. In fact, Mei and Andrea should be landing in Dublin in a couple hours. According to the itinerary.

But Neha, Jake, Marianne, and I are actually in Atlanta, hanging out in a hotel, looking forward to our trip to Amsterdam the following afternoon. No, we didn't ditch our other two friends for a chance at Amsterdam's crazy adventures. This is the result of misfortunes, odd opportunities, and a lot of poor engineering.

It started with me (Shivani) leaving my passport behind. I promise, I was being perfectly responsible, making copies of important documents at the library the day before our flight. Naturally, I left the passport in the copy machine, overnight. If Jake and my dad hadn't reminded us to check for our passports before going to the airport, this would be a whole different story, but luckily, after hours of yelling on the phone and anxiously calling the library, my passport was found. Yes, already feeling irresponsible.

DFW airport, flight 1910 to Atlanta. Two hours on board, no air conditioning. Sitting next to us, Hot Dad (according to Jake, who one day aspires to be him) told us exactly how to make the airline give us our money's worth, down to the exact FAA regulation number, if we missed our connecting flight to Dublin. Just before Marianne went crazy from the heat, we were finally fixed and off to Atlanta.

Gate E10. Yeah we made it! Only, we're such caring travelers, we gave up our seats to the 20 or so travelers who were praying to finally make it out of the Atlanta airport and onto the ridiculously overbooked flight. So, with vouchers and promises of a confirmed flight the following afternoon, we left the gate.

Qdoba Mexican Restaurant. Apparently the only place willing to sell food after 10pm in an airport. Even McDonalds was closed. But clearly these guys weren't expecting hungry travelers after 10pm, because they ran out of vegetables and glared when we asked for more tomatoes in our burritoes.

Outside the airport, waiting for the hotel shuttle. This wouldn't be worth a paragraph, except somehow our luck is so truly terrible unique that one of the measly two hotel shuttles broke down, forcing us to wait two hours just to get to the hotel.

Hotel elevator. Somehow the elevator refuses to go to our rooms at floor 4. We only discover this after a couple trips up and down.

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No, we're nowhere near Dublin. But we figure we've already had enough adventures on this trip, enough stories that need sharing, that this creation was absolutely necessary.

So, welcome to this blog, Europe for the Lulzies, for those of us who just roll with the punches, ready for anything that might happen on this crazy BA Graduation Trip. We hope that things get more interesting when we finally, actually get to Europe. But we're ready for anything!

Sincerely,
Mei, Andrea, Jake, Neha, Marianne, and I (Shivani) <3