Day 49 – Going home

It was 6am and we were up to finish packing and tidying up the apartment. We told the owners to come at 7am, thinking they would be late but they turned up 10 minutes earlier and we still hadn’t finished packing. It was a bit awkward as they watched us get ready and ask us what we did during our stay.

Finally we finished and could leave, saying our thanks and goodbyes. Now we had left even earlier than we wanted but knew that we could get an earlier bus to the airport. We had to get change first though and hardly anything was open at this time on a Sunday morning. A bakery coffee shop had just opened and after buying a coffee, she hadn’t enough change to give me and I had to pay by card. The coffee was also disgusting and so both a waste of time and money.

The next shop had a change machine we could use and after spilling my awful coffee over me, I was annoyed that we didn’t go here first. The bus came and was empty (we were the first stop) but with every stop it got progressively busier. After only a few stops, capacity was reached and the bus driver couldn’t let anyone else on.

Before checking in, we both used the bathrooms to finish getting ready but my girlfriend took forever, brushing her teeth for what seemed like half an hour. Thankfully there wasn’t a big queue to check in our bags and my bag was ridiculously light when it was weighed. We then headed up to security where there was starting to be a problem.

Airports always seem to design these areas where the escalator takes you to the end of a queue, whether it is at a boarding gate in Glasgow (which I’ve experienced) or at security here in Nice. People come up the escalator and bump into the people into the line or run away to the side as you obviously can’t stop on the escalator itself. Major design flaw.

Security was fast as we didn’t have anything anyway but when we got through, there were no seats and so we just headed straight to the departure gate. All the food was so expensive as well. Buses collected us to take us to our plane and it was a bit further away than our plane in Bratislava. Although we tried to get seats together. My girlfriend and I were separated by a couple of rows. However, when the seatbelt signs went off, she told me that the row in front of her was empty and so we both moved here for the rest of the flight.

I was expecting rain and maybe even snow but the weather was actually alright, just a bit chilly. We had landed in Shannon Airport, not really one of the main Irish airports but one with the cheapest flights. It just meant that we would need to get a couple of buses to get home. Before that, we got a meal deal that wouldn’t scan for my girlfriend and she had ended up causing an 11 person queue behind us.

After all the fuss, we got our tickets and our bus before falling asleep to the stories told by two Irish ladies in front of us, talking about their daughters coming for dinner and so on. In Galway, the ticket girl wouldn’t give us any information on buses, rudely saying “this is the ticket desk, do I look like an information desk”. I had to refrain myself from saying “no sorry, you look like a bitch!”

We tried to ask one of the bus inspectors and he was very nice and helpful, the complete opposite to the ticket girl. We had an hour to wait and so we left, finding a bar and watched both Donegal play in the Ulster final and a man literally spend €50 on a poker machine with absolutely zero return.

After getting our bus to Sligo, we got collected by my girlfriend’s family and we all drove home, talking about the trip and finally getting home to enjoy the most famous Chinese takeaway in the North-West, Water Fortune.