So here's the story...

I'm going to get this coming home story done and then I'll write about the trip. So we show up at the Dublin airport at 7:30am and the departures board says, "Cancelled." That's never a good sign. The only thing they told anyone was that there wasn't a plane to fly on. After waiting 45 minutes, the people at the US Air counter finally started dealing with people and eventually shepherded us outside to wait for a bus. The bus took us to an airport hotel where they had water and chips for us--I think so we didn't riot. Luckily, there was a nice big park across the street from the hotel, so we took Ryder for a walk while we waited for lunch--and word on our hotel rooms and flight. After lunch, we decided to take a walk to the shopping center that was 20 minutes away and see Pirates of the Caribbean, which we both wanted to see and haven't had a chance yet. Ryder feel asleep on the walk there and slept the entire movie! (We wanted to take the extra day and go explore the country around Dublin, but we didn't really feel it would be responsible since we didn't have our room or flight settled. But the day turned out really nicely anyway.) So we got back to the hotel and they had our room ready, but when we went to our room, the whole area of the city had a power outage. So they couldn't bring our bags since the elevator didn't work. And when we went to dinner, we couldn't eat since they couldn't cook. So it was back to the park for us. And after an hour we finally were able to eat. I did feel bad for the hotel people since this really wasn't their problem and people were constantly bugging them about if they knew anything else about our flight since they were the only people we had to bug. Finally at 10pm, they called to tell us that there was a meeting at 10:15pm downstairs (this was the first info we had about the flight in 15 hours). So at the meeting they said that the flight that was supposed to come in that we were supposed to take home never left Philly because of mechanical problems. But that flight left 24 hours late and was getting into Dublin the next morning early. And this is where the real problem came in. They had decided that the best plan was for us to wait the 16 hour ground interval the crew needed to fly home rather than have another crew for us. That means that we were now scheduled to leave a little after midnight (that's Tues morning instead of Sun morning for those of you keeping track) and get into Philly at 3am. Sucks. But nothing to be done about it. So after not having to get up so early (got to look at the positives!), we spent our second full extra day in Dublin by visiting a little seaside town 20 minutes south of Dublin. There was an island off the coast with 3 ruins and a herd of wild goats, so we spent some time hiking there before having a lovely late lunch in town and eventually some lovely crepes in Dublin on the way back to the hotel. Ryder loved the island, as well as the bus, train and boat that it took to get there. We really enjoyed the day and, since our flight didn't leave till after midnight, we had plenty of time to explore all day and still eat dinner and pack when we got back before heading to the hotel. The buses started taking people to the airport at 8:30, where, after waiting in a huge line and getting all checked in (also remember that everything in the airport is closed since it's so late), they finally let us know that we were going to be delayed for refueling. Like they didn't have 16 hours to get that done??? Anyway, around 1am we finally left and got into Philly at 3am, at which point everything is also closed. So we walked around the airport, rode the moving walkways and generally tried to keep a 2 year old happy in a closed airport in the middle of the night. We eventually found a kids' play area, which they told us was closed, but there was no door and we really weren't in the mood to listen to rules of airline people at this point anyway, so we played there for an hour till it was actually late enough to get something to eat before heading to the flight. After taking a 7:30am flight to Indy, we got in at 9am, after having been up 8+ hours already. It was a long, long day. But in the end we got here, albeit two days late, and, besides having a much lower opinion of US Air, there's really no harm done.