Saturday, October 21 dawns as a warm and leaf dropping day. We are packed and ready to leave home by 9:00 and darling Darcy arrives 3 minutes early, accompanied by her faithful companion Norman the dog, to take us to the airport to start what will undoubtedly be a long 24 hours of travel. We have three bags to check: one with Deb’s clothes, one with Mark’s clothes and one with gifts and loot for the Highland family, whose home in Ireland we are going to visit as part of our adventures. We check the bags all the way through to Leeds, U.K., our final destination for this first week.
We leave on time from Eppley Airfield in Omaha, headed for O’Hare in Chicago and then onward to Liberty Airfield in Newark New Jersey. The schedules all work out fine, no rushing from terminal to terminal, and we even score a slight upgrade in Newark as we board the 777 for Dublin. Most of the flights are full, with the exception of the Newark to Dublin leg, which is probably about 60% capacity. We arrive in Dublin at 7:00 AM local time and then find a lounge to rest for a few hours prior to our final leg from Dublin into Leeds.
The food was non-existent on any flights except the over the water leg to Dublin. We both opted for the cheese stuffed pasta over the chicken on offer. It was fair, but not award winning. The wine however was gratis, so that made the dinner a little more palatable. The morning sandwich of egg and cheese on a hamburger roll was horrible! The cheese appeared to be onions and not cheese and the egg patty surely never saw the back end of a chicken. We each took one bite and stopped. Did we mention the coffee was undrinkable, this even for Deb who normally doses hers up with milk and sweetener.
Needless to say, we were glad to find a lounge in the Dublin Airport just a few steps away from our next gate. We talked our way in, even though Deb didn’t bring the proper entry card. We rested, had some excellent coffee and juice, together with a scone and some raspberry jam.
The announcement for our flight to Leeds was made at 9:55 so we headed to the gate for loading. We learned that we were boarding a bus to take us to the aircraft. Out we go across the tarmac and pull up to a 70 passenger propeller plane - we hadn’t been in a prop for years. The trip was smooth over the Irish Sea and we landed in Leeds 45 minutes later. We were tired; Mark did not sleep on the overnight flight and Deb only managed a couple of hours. We were cranky and tired of airports, this was our 5th in less than 24 hours.
Did you catch the rooky travel mistake we’d made? You might recall that in the first paragraph above we described our packing. We have known, and usually try and practice spreading our packing over both suitcases, some underwear, socks and a shirt for each of us in each suitcase. Well, this time we weren’t paying attention and we are paying the priced. Mark’s suitcase is amongst the missing. (Son Jake will be quickly sending an “I told you so” message; he counseled us to purchase some Apple Air Tags for the luggage, but I poopooed the idea.)
The errant bag may actually still be in Leeds, or at any of the other 4 airports we visited. Leeds had a plane slide off the runway in a storm last week. No one was injured, but they were forced to close the airport for a few days and the luggage stacked up. There was one large room filled with bags, although we didn’t see our missing one. I know, I know Jake; if I had installed an air tag I could have found the bag if it was there. We filled out a “missing person” report and are hoping that it shows in the next week. For the moment, Mark will be rinsing his underwear and wearing a long sleeved tee-shirt of Deb’s (suitably uni-sex looking but he is not picky.)
We then proceeded to National Car Rental to pick up our ride for the next week, a nice 4-door SUV on the small side, with only 426 miles on the odometer. Our lodging for this week is the Low Mill Guest House in Bainbridge, a small village tucked into the Yorkshire Dales National Park. We picked this village as we had driven through it a number of times last year on our visit and decided to home base in the same general area.
The drive to Bainbridge was about an hour and one half, the weather was perfect and the traffic was relatively light. The area has received lots of rain in the last few weeks, and many of the rivers had flooded over their banks. It was wonderful so see and hear the rushing water in the rivers and brooks as we drove along. Our original plan was to stop and find some shirts, socks and underwear for Mark, but after arriving, we were too tired. We bought a bottle of wine and some soda water, broke out the red hot pretzels we had stashed as a snack, and we were down for the count by 6:00 - a very long day, but we ended up right where we want to be.
