Back home!

The folks were surprised as anything when I popped home on the 4th Oct!! (I had previously told them that I would be coming back on the 18th).

When I rang from the airport, I first pretended to be calling via Skype from T.O, but since I was stranded at Dublin airport at 11.30 pm with no transport I needed a lift so had to let the cat out of the bag a bit earlier (the original plan was to get a bus home and then sneak into the house... although with the new dog in the house, that could have been messy!)

The fair ol' isle is the same as ever...like I'd never left... half the population are Latvian and the air is clean, crisp n cold ...yeah even Canada is warmer than Dublin right now!!
Still, home sweet home... plus Teddy, our new pooch, is a cute lil' bugger! I've become accustomed to doggy spit all over my mouth now as a wake up call each morning.

Coming over from Toronto to Glasgow on the $99 Air Transat flight was nice enough. Leather seats, and that price can't be beat
The 5 hour flight literally "flew" by as I watched two movies and then suddenly came the call that we were landing in Belfast before going on to Glasgow - the trip back to Toronto is apparently 7 hours long because of westerly breezes!

I met a Scottish woman on board the flight who told me about a great website for getting even cheaper flight deals from Canada to Ireland and vice versa: CanadianAffair.com ... sure enough when I logged onto that site later on I found a flight from Glasgow all the way to Vancouver for only $49 ?!?!? Unbelievable!!!

I had to layover in Glasgow from 7am to 11pm since my connecting flight wasn't due till then, so I found a relatively quiet area to catch up on all that sleep I missed... fortunate enough because that evening I went through one of the most stressful events on my trip so far...

A new rule in UK airports states that you are only allow to carry one bag on board the plane (apparently in order to speed up the xray process!! Nothing to do with security).

Here I was with my two laptops in one bag, and my SLR camera plus PSP/DS and smaller camera in the other bag, not to mention all the electronics belonging to each.

Several hours passed while I tried to reason with several authorities to persuade them to let me through since neither bag could go in the hold. They even said that if I could find one large plastic bag to carry my two bags in, then that would be ok. Bloody ridiculous.

At one point I unpacked my main clothes bag and emptied the contents in the middle of the airport - people standing around gawking - while I tried to see if I could fit one of the laptops in and pad it.. this was a no-goer.

I was seriously considering taking a boat back.. but this would have been killer with the heavy bags on my broken elbow!

Eventually I found out they would let me through if I took my SLR camera out of the bag and put the rest in the hold... jesus FINE! So I padded the bag and sent the rest through to the cargo.

Luckily they all came out fine in Dublin.

Anyhoo... I'm back to the grind here, but at least I've offloaded another 27 kg from Toronto. I was overweight on the flights - but incidentally they forgot to charge me for it! So at least I saved another 150 euro there


Onward to my 30th birthday on the 20th Oct!!