Picking up where I left off on my 10-day break cruising the Mediterranean: We missed our flight on day 10 back to Ireland. In a groupthink situation similar to the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, the eight of us on the cruise booked a 7:20 a.m. flight from Gerona airport in Barcelona because our boat was to arrive at 5:00 a.m. in the morning. What we didn’t consider was we needed to board the flight at 6:50 a.m., Gerona is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes taxi ride from Barcelona, and our boat had to go through security and we wouldn’t be let out until 6:00 a.m. To complicate and confuse matters, daylight savings set time back an hour. That morning our traveling troupe woke at 4:00 a.m. in hopeful anticipation that we would pull of a miracle. By 5:00 a.m. the boat had docked and security began their check. This was a heart-wrenching hour experience. I literally watched a group of five Spaniards security personal take place in a push-up contest followed by a jumping-jack tournament. Meanwhile I was preparing a 50-foot jump past the ship’s Nepali security guards into the Atlantic Ocean.

Needless to say we missed the flight.

We proceeded to book a flight through Easy Jet into Belfast leaving Barcelona at 7:30 p.m. This was a tough situation but we really lucked out. The flight was not too expensive, and our next best options were to pay a fortune to get into Dublin our stay in Barcelona until Wednesday, effectively missing three days of class. I tried to keep an even keel about the whole situation pretending I was competing on the Amazing Race.

I watched a transformation in our group’s attitude happen that can sum up my entire experience in Ireland thus far. The entire day was stressful until arriving at the terminal. I immediately walked to the first person I saw with an Irish passport and explained our situation and asked for advice. I ended up talking to Eugene, an older man who first gave us advice, and then consulted with the other Irish round him and called his son back home to look up information. At this point the entire terminal was huddled around us in what had become an emergency rescue situation, and he looked at the eight of us and told us if all else failed we were all welcome to spend the night at his home in Belfast. I kid you not he even told us we could crack open a bottle of whiskey.

With the help of Eugene at the Belfast airport, we managed to figure out a series of busses and taxis that would get us back to Galway. Let me tell you dear reader, this is no easy task on a Sunday night, especially because Monday was a bank holiday for some unknown reason. This ended up taking roughly eight hours, but hey, we were in Ireland. After a 3-hour ride from Dublin to Galway, we called up a cab for what should have been a fifteen-minute ride into Spiddal. This ended up taking close to an hour, as we were forced to share a cab with five heavily intoxicated people who first could not find the cab, then could not find one of their friends, then needed to stop and get food. This was on a Sunday night at 3:30 in the morning mind you, God bless the Irish. After more than 24 hours (we went through a time zone coming back to Ireland) of traveling with little to no sleep, we arrived at the Park Lodge Hotel and said good-bye to our cab mates who had broken into song at that point. Adventuring slash exploring can be taxing, but I managed to make a good time of the situation.