Travelling "fun" with easyJet

Well our flight ended up leaving Edinburgh at 12:20pm (instead of 8:30am), so we arrived in at London's Gatwick airport just in time to miss our connecting flight to Shannon, Ireland. EasyJet, for those of you who are ignorant Americans like us, is a point-to-point airline, so therefore they don't offer any "connection services" per se, they only promise to get us to our destination at some point (not necessarily quickly). Uncle Michael described them as the Amtrak of the air ;-). Anyhow, they basically said their next flight was the next night and that they couldn't help us work with another airline to get to Shannon before their flight more than 24 hours later.

This didn't work so well for us since we were due to start a tour at 2pm today...so after much bustling about at Gatwick, we were able to get a flight on RyanAir for 10pm that evening that left London's Stansted airport. So a 3 hour busride later and we were all ready to get on a new flight at a new airline...the result was that a journey which began at 6am ended at around midnight...but we did get to Shannon..and on the same day, so I was relatively content. Nerves were pretty short by the end of the day though. Discussions of simply abandoning our trip to Ireland cropped up during the hour+ that we were shopping for a flight to Shannon - our backup if this flight hadn't existed would have been to fly to Dublin in the morning and hope that a taxi could move us 120 miles to Shannon before the tour left...wasn't promising.

Oh and one other thing...some excitement happened in Edinburgh when two Scottish police officers armed with machine guns (or sub-machine guns) went into the gate that our flight was theoretically leaving from about 10 minutes before the plane arrived...interestingly they switched the gates, so apparently they weren't after someone on the plane - I guess they were just checking the gate? Anyhow, very odd.

We started the tour today, I'll write about that tomorrow.