London to Chicago

The hotel didn’t have AC, but did have windows that open a bit, so I could get some cooling effect & got a decent amount of sleep, admittedly in “only my feet are under the covers” mode. Woke up a little bit before my alarm.
Hotel breakfast wasn’t as crowded as I’d dreaded. ( there was a huge group that arrived a bit after I did, and I was having flashbacks to hotels where an entire tour group hit the restaurant at the same time ) Plus, I actually got to have hotel breakfast; Usually I’m on an earlier flight & leave before dawn, but I didn’t do that this time. I’m not entirely sure why I did it last time.

Getting back to the airport took less time than I’d expected, and the Aer Lingus check-in was empty. I’d been expecting it to be the usual long line of chaos, with people being pulled from said line when their flight is close to boarding, but that’s maybe an early morning thing.
Instead, because I was so early, they offered to put me on an earlier flight. Didn’t take them up on it, mostly because I get nervous enough about flying without complicating things at the last minute. But also because I wanted to chill for a bit. I thought, after the fact, that this might have been a mistake, and an earlier flight giving more time at US Preclearance in Dublin would have been a good move.
Security was similarly quick; Spent more time walking to the scanning bit than I did at the scanner, though they then swabbed the inside of my bag, which is a new one on me. I’ve had swabs of me at a tonne of airports, and one train station, but not my carry-on.

Flight to Dublin was uneventful, but also cloudy, so my window seat didn’t have much of a view. Not sure why, but we didn’t get an airbridge space at the terminal; Instead it was rolling stairs and a series of buses to get there. I think that happened to me once before at Dublin, also at a point when I was a bit concerned about transfer time.
The delay does make the people who immediately stand up and block the aisle look even more ridiculous, so that’s a positive thing.

“Declining the offer of an earlier flight might have been a mistake” came up again when I saw the giant line at US Preclearance. It snaked back & forth & around the top of the escalators, and didn’t seem like a good sign at all.
The line did move, however; They’d send people down in batches, and were periodically pulling people on specific flights from the line if it got too close.
I’m assuming the idea was to keep the bulk of people out in the giant line so that the preclearance area didn’t become even more of a nightmare.

The security screening seemed kind of odd to me. They had bag scanning, and “take off your shoes”, but nothing for the people – you just walked through & collected your stuff at the other side. Not really sure what the point of it was, especially as it’s inside the airport, so all of those things have already happened before they got to that point.

The Border Control section was the part I’ve been slightly dreading; It’s the bit where they can decide not to let me proceed if they don’t think I’m being honest, or if they just don’t want to let me in. I got a bunch of questions back in 2016 when I was travelling to the USA while unemployed, and some pretty blunt questions in 2024 when I went back to NZ, so … I was anticipating an unpleasant interaction.

Honestly, wasn’t so bad. I’d had that CBP agent before, but he was friendlier this time, so maybe he just isn’t a morning person? They were questions about my itinerary, and he asked to see my ticket out of the USA, which was a new one on me, but overall it wasn’t too bad; It didn’t feel like an interrogation, which the 2016 one absolutely did, and it didn’t feel like he was suspicious, which is how it came across last year. Maybe my Gen Con shirt helped.

Got to the gate as they started boarding, so it wasn’t too close. Still would have liked it to be even less close than that though, just for peace of mind.

The flight? Was a flight. Watched a bunch of season one of the new Night Court show, minus those episodes I’d seen on Fiji Airways flights. I did try watching a few movies, but my attention span wasn’t up to it. My seatmate was having trouble with the entertainment system, partly from unfamiliarity, partly from a confusing interface, but also from not paying attention to what people were trying to tell her when she asked for help; Yes, it is perhaps confusing that the volume button opens up a slider somewhere else on the screen, but if you just stab at it and complain and don’t look where the person who is trying to help is pointing, … I don’t see how you expect that to work out well.

Baggage Claim was the standard chaos, with the added factor of the airline giving one carousel number, the screens in the terminal giving a different one, and the screens on the carousels disagreeing with both of them. Got my bag eventually, after letting it do a lap of the system because I couldn’t get to it, and headed for where the hotel said their shuttle would be.

Yeah, about that.

It wasn’t Terminal 5. Nor was it at the bus centre after T5, as one of the inter-terminal transit folks said. No, after I checked with a driver for the bus to the parking lots, it turned out to be at Terminal 2. On the ground floor. Directly outside the baggage claim. Back. Where. I. Started.

An absolute shout-out of thanks goes to the parking lot bus driver, who got out of her bus & walked me over to where I could see where to go, so that I didn’t get lost.

The fun didn’t stop there, sadly; It was indeed a consolidated location for all of the hotel shuttles, but with no zoning, so the shuttle would stop somewhere along a 200m stretch of covered roadway; I found the right one more by accident than anything else, after walking the length of the crowded noisy & generally exhausting space, by noticing a paper sign in the window of one bus which sort of looked like it had one of the words in the hotel name on it.

Don’t remember it being that bad a few years back; They had designated areas for each group of hotels, and signs communicating it. Not so much this time.

Finally, I got to the hotel. Got my room, set the AC as low as I could, and relaxed a bit.

I should say that while this does sound like a catalog of woes, it’s really just the bits that stick out, because the vast majority of the trip was uneventful “being on a plane” stuff, and it’s a bit difficult to say more about that than I just did.