It's Me, Sara Louise

The holiday adrenaline has left me and even though I feel like a little fat slug, I’m still going to tell you all about my week. Let’s see… where to start… how about with Dublin’s insane snowfall? The most snow they’ve had for many, many years (too lazy to look it up, but trust me, it was a lot).

Dublin doesn’t usually get snow, maybe some flurries here and there but this year they got SNOW. And so did London and Paris, and that meant that all the airports went a bit haywire. And on the 23rd my panic set in as Dublin Airport would close, then open, then close again, cancelling loads of flights and shattering many a Christmas dream. Well they weren’t going to shatter mine. No-Sir-Ree-Bob.

Since I can’t actually control the weather (but oh how I have tried) and I don’t drive the snow plow at Dublin Airport, I did the only thing my control freak could do from 855 miles away; I followed the airport on twitter and obsessively checked their feed for updates (handy little tool twitter is). Eventually I had to let my control freak rest and call it a night. But then on Xmas Eve I woke up to find out that Dublin Airport had reopened after being closed during the night. Can I get a H A L L E L U J A H?!

The flight was delayed. I can handle a delay. I can even handle the plane being rerouted to Shannon Airport (being the control freak girl scout that I am, I had printed out the Shannon to Dublin train schedule just in case). We made ourselves comfy in the bar and to stop the imminent huffing and puffing from you know who (The Husband is who in case you are a new reader… and if so, hello and welcome), I told him to think of this as a little date instead of a delay. We were in a bar, without The Spaniard, Honey Jr, or Brother-in-Law (a rare occurrence). Besides it was Xmas Eve, and the bar was full of Irish people. Irish people are fun in a crisis. Provided there’s a bar. And sure enough, within the hour the bar sounded more like a proper pub with all the chatter and the barman who had been looking quite bored before, found himself rather busy continuously restocking the Heineken cans (tap had already run out). I took a photo for evidential proof of the restocking:

So we sat and had a little Xmas Eve party of Heinekens, Pringles, and bad Merlot like so…

And I was happy; bad Merlot and all. See below for proof of my happiness:

 

See, I told you I look happy. And I was, because I knew that Santa wasn’t going to let me down and no matter what, I was going to Dublin that night even if he had to swing by and pick me up himself.

And then my Christmas Eve miracle occurred when they announced that our flight was boarding and it was only three hours delayed, and then, even though it was night time, I was still able to order a full Irish breakfast on board (miracle number 2 thank you very much). And when we landed, it looked like we landed in Siberia instead of Dublin, but it was Dublin, and we found out that ours was one of the very last flights to land before the airport was shut down again for the whole night. No more flights until after Christmas. Thousands of passengers were stranded that night, but not us.