Day 1: Chicago to Dublin

Sunday, June 9

Four hours of sleep is how this one starts. At least for me. Amanda got way less. We were up packing and getting our affairs in order until approximately 3:30am, or roughly 16.5 hours before our flight. Then the alarms started going off just before 7, so that Amanda could get to her roller derby assessment on time. After i dropped her off at that, it was up to me to haul ass around town and purchase a few last minute necessities and print off all 140 pages of random information that have been emailed to me regarding this trip. This includes useful things like tickets for some of our flights, boarding passes for trains, and accommodation confirmations, and less useful things like spam to buy more services. I just tossed it all indiscriminately into a 3-ring binder.

So then there were sandwiches, and then there was driving. Amanda's parents brought us down to Chicago and left us at the airport so that we wouldn't have to pay $53 per day to park a vehicle (i probably shouldn't be shocked by that figure, but i am). On the drive i put on my new chest harness for my GoPro, to try it out, and decided that i'd try and wear it through security, just in case the TSA tried to put their finger in my butt or something.

First checkpoint: “Is that a camera on your chest?”

“Um. Yes! Yes it is.”

“Is it recording right now?”

Maybe playing dumb a little, i looked down at it and said, “Oh! Yeah, i guess it is! Is that ok? Do i need to turn it off?”

“No, you're fine,” she said, and then two other guards leaned in, smiling and waving.

Second checkpoint, after i'm through the scanner: “Is that a toaster on your leg?”

“Yeah! It didn't set off the metal detector, did it?”

“No, but i have to ask why.”

So all in all, getting checked in to the flight and through security took less than fifteen minutes. And the TSA now has a picture of my balls.

We sat down at our gate at 5:30 for our 8:00 flight. They say to get to the airport three hours early, and usually they're right, but damn, we did good.

I mostly wanted to tell the story about the security and my chest camera. Nothing else interesting has happened yet; we're still at the gate. We walked around and checked out the whole terminal for about an hour, but that's it. Our flight should start boarding any minute now.