When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

On Monday afternoon, I was sitting around on my fourth day of Reserve when they call me with a Costa Rica trip for early evening. About 10 minutes later, the scheduler calls back and asks me if I can make a 3:50pm deadhead, and if so, would I rather go to Dublin, Ireland, out of Chicago. Not a hard question to answer.

I got the airport for my deadhead. The flight was not full so I managed an aisle seat in coach and sat next to a nice young girl from Cameroon, who was going to Frankfurt to visit friends. There was another flight attendant from my base going to cover the trip was well, named Ginger, and it was her first time to Ireland, so she was pretty psyched. I had been to Shannon years ago on a diversion, but never got off the plane, so this was really my first time too.

We met up with our Chicago based crew and boarded the plane to prepare for our departure. I was the Coach galley, responsible for cooking all the food and setting up all the carts. It had been a while since I had done this on a Transatlantic flight, so I was a bit rusty, but everything sort of fell into place.

Our flight over was about 7 hours and most of the passengers were low maintenance. We landed in Dublin about 9am, cleared customs and made our way to the bus that would take us to our hotel.

The hotel property was quite nice and they offer us a free breakfast every morning. Ginger and I were the only two who had never been to Dublin before, so we decided we would power nap and then meet up in the lobby and walk into town to do some sightseeing around noon.

The weather was great, probably in the mid 70's and partly cloudy. We strolled down O'Connell Street, which is sort of the main drag into Dublin and takes you over the River Liffey. We bought tickets on the Dublin Bus, a hop on, hop off double decker tour bus that hits all the main part of Dublin.

O'Connell Street

Monument to Irish Independence

We first hopped off at Trinity College, where the Book of Kells is displayed. This book was written sometime around 800 AD in Iona, an island off the coast of Scotland. It contains the four Gospels of the New Testament, transcribed in Latin, as well as ornate illustrations. I was not allowed to take pictures, so you can check out more about it at the Wikipedia site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_kells

Trinity College

After leaving Trinity College, we hopped back on the bus and went to the National Gallery. It kind of reminded me of the Prado because they had a lot of Spanish paintings in addition to the Irish ones. After walking around the various floors, we stopped at the Gallery cafe and had a late lunch.

We took the bus thru the rest of it's route and got some great shots of various parts of the city. Lots of cathedrals and monuments.

We ended our afternoon with some souvenir shopping and then headed back to the hotel. At 6pm, they set out wine for our crew and the Continental Airlines crew (and they are apparently notorious for stealing our wine so you have to get there early).

This was our Captain Jack's last trip before retirement so the crew had planned a little special party. We had brownies and snacks to go with the wine and we all presented him with a card.

For dinner we walked to a nearby Indian Restaurant along a canal (note the sign below) and then retired for the evening.

The next morning we all get wake-up calls one hour before pick up, so the phone rings at 7:40am and it is the concierge saying "Good Morning Sir, this is your 7:40 wake up call. Oh... and you are not going home today". I was not prepared to hear that, but apparently the flight had cancelled out of Chicago the night before so there was no plane for us to take home. Now, getting stuck an extra day can suck, unless you are in a cool city like Dublin in which case, it ain't that bad.

We all went up for our free breakfast and decided we would take a little nap and meet at 11 to go back into town and tour the Guinness Brewery.

It was another great day, a little warmer and sunnier. On the way to the brewery, we stopped at The Brazen Head, the oldest pub in Ireland (1100AD). We stapled a Dollar bill to the wall and signed it "Flight 93 Cancelled 7-23-08" and had a beer.

We continued on to the Guinness Brewery. The tours are self guided and you go up a series of floors ending at the Gravity Bar on top that offers a 360 degree view of Dubin. I learned that Guinness is not carbonated, but rather nitrogenated. I can't say I really enjoyed the taste all that much, but it was part of the experience.

After the brewery, we proceeded to Temple Bar, the part of town with lots of pubs and restaurants. Ireland no longer permits smoking in pubs and restaurants, so it was nice to be able to sit inside and not smell all the smoke. We all had Fish & Chips and mushy peas (they were great). The girls decided they wanted to keep drinking, so I walked back to the hotel with my other co-worker, Doug.

We all met up for night two of Happy Hour at 6pm and then Ginger and I went to a local restaurant for dinner before retiring for the night.

The flight home was ok. It's a daylight flight and the passengers were always up and standing in our way. Since it was blocked over 8 hours, we are contractually guaranteed crew rest seats, so we each got to retire for about an hour and a half and sleep. Most of the passengers were older Americans who were on a tour and returning home and they were constantly going to the bathroom. We arrived into Chicago a little late and Ginger and I hauled ass to try to make our deadhead back to base, but we missed it by 3 minutes, so we had to catch the next flight where I had a middle seat between two very large men.

It was a great trip, getting an extra day and all, and since it's not a trip on our bidsheet, it was nice to go somewhere out of the ordinary.