Heading home

We have mainly packed and left out the clothes for today, tomorrow

 after arriving in Chicago and just need to get up in the morning, get dressed and leave.  John and I are up early, mainly because I can never sleep in the day of travel and we are ready to go before the alarm, have to prod and push Oscar to wake up which he doesn’t want to do.  I remind

him that we are going to take a tram to the airport and that gets him up and going.  We catch an uber to the tram station and then John can’t get the machine to give him tickets, so we have to buy two sets of tickets before we board the tram and take it all the way to the airport.  This tram in to the airport is awesome and inexpensive.  One of those awesome perks of good public transport done right.  Except for John keeping the tickets in one of his pockets and forgetting where he put them so that we can turn them in at the end of the journey, it is 

 without any problems.  We head into the airport and the Aer Lingus person we check in with believes that we will have no problem with getting to our connection in Dublin, but John is doubtful.  Our little prop plane takes us to Dublin while Oscar reads his Chelsea

magazines that we bought in the airport.  We had plans to get him more stuff with Chelsea while in the UK and this is our last chance now.  We arrive in Dublin and a lady that works for the airlines takes pity on Oscar and pulls us out of the line that needs their connecting boarding passes and takes us

 directly to border and customs precheck security.  She has taken an hour long wait at least out of our day and we’re through security and in to precheck in less than 30 minutes.  The people who are waiting for customs are sitting on the floor and this is not a 

good sign for how long things are taking.  But we get pulled out with other people going to Chicago and Miami because these airports have enhanced screening and we will go through post check.  I’m not happy about this because we’ve heard that Chicago is currently at 10 hours for going through customs and board patrol.  But they let us loose in the airport taking us back through everything we’ve gone through.  And all I can think is, “if they make us do this again because someone doesn’t

know what they’re talking about, I’ll lose my shit”.  But, apparently they know what they’re talking about.  We go up to have some lunch and buy some things in the shops, look around and when they announce our gate, we head to it.  It’s sad to be in Ireland this

close to St. Patrick’s Day and it’s like a funeral in here.  There’s just people scurrying everywhere and masks, hand sanitizer stations, people practicing some social distancing as much as possible.  We arrive at our gate and wait there for an hour.  The flight to

       Madrid in the next gate is delayed, so now there are two huge international flights of people sitting, standing hanging around each other, with other places in the airport with no one there.  Not good planning, but no one seems to be able to use common sense around this virus.