We are officially off! Since Manchester doesn’t do international flights, we had to get ourselves to Logan and rather than ask family or friends to sacrifice their night and their sanity by dropping us off, we hired Axis Coach. At around 8PM, our driver, Eric, arrived in a sweet, black, Lincoln Aviator which was more than capable of handling our one massive suitcase, one overhead-destined suitcase, Isabelle’s shoulder bag, and my backpack. We made good time, arriving at about 8:45PM.

Our flight wasn’t for another three hours.

The thing about Logan At Night is that practically no one is there. The other thing about Logan In General is that Aer Lingus has their gates on the other side of the building. We wandered through long, empty hallways whose merchants had all closed up for the night, leaving us with very few options should we have wanted something to eat while we wait.

We attempted to get an upgrade to business class since our flight was only carrying fifty people to Shannon, Ireland, but the price was exorbitant — $1000 per person, although those business class seats were really, really nice and looked comfy.

Unfortunately, due to the number of people on the flight, our seats were changed so as to balance the load during take-off and landing. The bad news was that we were four rows from the back now. The goods news is that once the plane was in the air, everyone could move about the cabin to sit where they wanted. We ended up with a free seat between us, which gave us a lot of room to stretch out. Isabelle managed to sleep for about an hour, but I only nodded off a few times.

As far as flights go, it was pretty uneventful. There was some turbulence for the first hour and the last thirty minutes or so, but otherwise, there was nothing to really say, good or bad.

Touching down in Shannon, now a good 12 hours ahead of our initial time of departure, it was Typical Ireland: rainy and windy. We managed to navigate Shannon Airport which was not very large, get our rental car, and we were off!