2017: British Isles & Ireland with Sheila & Nick: DAY-01: Underway For The UK (Wed, Aug, 23, 2017)

DAY-01: Outbound For Edinburgh

Day – 01: Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Starting Location: Kitty Hawk, NC, USA

Interim Location: Poquoson, VA, USA

Interim Location: Norfolk International Airport (ORF)
Interim Location: Dulles International Airport (IAD)
Ending Location: Southeast of Nova Scotia over the Atlantic

So today is departure day for what will be a 41-day journey through the British Isles and Ireland. This trip has been long in the planning but the time has come to board the “flying bird” and head to the northeast across the big waters.

The itinerary will be something like this:

Aug 23^rd – 24^th: Travel to Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Aug 24^th – Sep 5^th: Scotland, UK
Sep 5^th – 7^th: Wales, UK
Sep 8^th – 13^th: Southeastern England, UK
Sep 14^th – Oct 2^nd: Ireland
Oct 3^rd: Travel to Kitty Hawk, NC, USA

With a mid-afternoon (2:45 PM) departing flight there would be no rush today. We were finished with the final packing and Walmart purchases (power adaptors) by 9:30 AM and by 10 AM were on the road.

Yes, I have the passports.

With Sheila driving one car and Carrie and I in the second we were headed to Poquoson, VA to drop a car off for use by Shannon while we’re away. That task was completed by 12:15 PM leaving plenty of time for the trip to Norfolk International Airport a mere 45 minutes away. Before we had gone a mile we did stop to pick-up what we now know to be losing $700,000,000 Powerball tickets.

Side note: If you haven’t ever traveled from the Poquoson area to Norfolk, you should know about and account for tunnels. There are several routes that can be taken but all require transits through tunnels. Back to the travel …

We approached the highway only to see that our route had been compromised by a truck of some sort dropping its load on the highway into the tunnel or maybe in the tunnel, we’ll never know but the tunnel was closed until further notice. With that, Plan-B was selected, a route with two tunnel crossings and approximately 20 additional minutes of travel time. So what had been a 1h 15m cushion before boarding time had quickly become more like 50m, still okay as long as everything else clicked; and so it did, with Carrie dropping us off around 1:20 PM.

Within a few minutes we had checked in with United Airlines and passed our checked baggage off to the TSA folks adjacent to the ticket counter. For some reason Sheila was fascinated by the diligence of the TSA agents as they thoroughly searched through another passenger's checked luggage, wondering if our luggage would receive the same scrutiny.

Within a few minutes we arrived at our gate and awaited the boarding. The good news was that our plane was already at the gate, so leg one would surely be on time. We boarded United Flight #249 at 2:20 PM

and were soon in our seats for what would be a 45 minute flight to Washington's Dulles International Airport IAD) from where we would take the 2^nd leg to Newark International Airport (EWR) from where we would board our overnight flight to Edinburgh.

Seated behind me was this heavy breathing and panting passenger. she and her handler had boarded late. The "pup" was calm and very well behaved.

United Airlines A320

But not so fast, the flight deck crew at 2:30 advised us that they were late because the hotel shuttle had failed to pick them up, guess they don’t know about taxis or Uber. Not a problem the pilot advised as they would quickly do their pre-flight and then we would be on our way to Dulles.

The good news was that yes they were quick, the bad news was that they found a problem, to paraphrase the pilot, “it’s likely just a gauge problem, we’ll have maintenance out to take a look; if only we hadn’t been delayed by the hotel shuttle we would have found this problem sooner”. Thirty minutes goes by, no maintenance, an hour goes by no maintenance but they do now have a work order. The next announcement was something like "well, the maintenance tech that was headed our way had an accident and was taken to the hospital, we’re working on finding someone else to check out the faulty gauge”.

The passengers were ultimately taken off the plane. Our 2-hour cushion at Dulles was quickly vanishing. The good news was that the gate agents were diligently working to re-route connecting passengers. We worked our schedule through United’s “800” number and after looking at numerous options most of which resulted in a 36 hour delayed arrival in Scotland we convinced the United folks to allow us to go off their system if it would improve our arrival options. With that we settled on an alternate route, five hours after our scheduled departure we were headed to Dulles on another United flight, UA1630.

We would then be leaving later that night on UA924 headed to London Heathrow (LHR) for a Thursday AM arrival followed by a British Airways flight BA1446 to Edinburgh (EDI). If all went as planned we would only be 7-hours late but still arriving on Thursday, August 24^th.