Airport Adventurings

It's funny how my watch keeps telling me it's 1:30 in the afternoon. Cause, you know, it is. No one's told my internal clock that yet. It's only 7:30 am in Utah. I left SLC around 1:00 pm yesterday and have scarcely gotten one spotty hour of sleep since then. I am now embarking on an hour-long bus ride to the cliffs of Moher and trying desperately to stay awake. How? By blogging, of course.

I know everyone is wondering where the "adventure" comes into any of this. Well, don't get too excited. We almost missed our connection from London to Shannon Ireland. We arrived in London with about an hour and a half before our connection took off. Plenty of time right? And we didn't dally around or anything either. What we didn't count on was having to go through security again for a connecting flight. By the time they were done confiscating and discarding the mousse that SLC's security let me take (sorry, Mom),we had a  half hour before the flight was scheduled to take off. This was about the time that they started paging us. We had at least three "last call"s before we made it to the gate. Heathrow could easily be compared to Daedelus' labyrinth, with long, twisting corridors that never end. We sprinted across two terminals and made it with twenty minutes to spare. Of course, the plane then proceeded to sit at the gate until twenty minutes after the scheduled departure time. Good thing we hurried. At least we got some cardio in, right?  Of course, arriving in Shannon on time with all our luggage was more than the rest of our group could hope for. Six of us are here now, but eleven others were supposed to arrive before us and were delayed leaving Chicago. Which is weird, because our plane left from Chicago at about the same time and we had no problems. The rest of the group will be arriving around 10 tonight. I am. Very glad I was part of the small group that had to sprint through Heathrow Airport. Some preliminary thoughts on Ireland:
-it is wet, and it is green
-the roads are super narrow
-they have a lot of roundabouts
-it is completely normal to have a modern house twenty feet away from a dilapidated ruin that is thousands of years old
-it is beautiful!

Preliminary Pictures: Shannon Airport and Ireland!

 Mckenna, Amber, Megan, and (Jessica) Palmer

One other thought. The customs officer at Heathrow said "cheers" to me when I thanked him. I don't know why this made me so happy, as the same thing hAppened at WDW every other day, but it did. I also saw the Thames from above, which was a little mind-blowing. Now I am looking at a wall of rain that is sheeting across the Irish countryside. That's really all for now. More on the cliffs of Moher later!