Talk About Good Starts...

Following two hours sleep the day could have gone so much better, worst thing is it's only just midday. It can get a whole lot worse. We start with an early rise, leaving my house with Martin at six AM, things were looking exciting and promising until fifteen minutes before we were due to board. The man behind the desk informed us that we're not aloud to fly to the USA without a return ticket. I flew with one last time. So with that we now had about ten minutes to run to a flight desk, and buy one back with a made up date that fitted with the parameters of our Visa and money.

The man behind the desk had found us a ticket to be forced on us, and all with the lovely price tag of £600... each. Are you freaking kidding me? So with five minutes left Martin and I were now rinsed of £1200, ever so gently. Our flight to Dublin went rather quickly and smoothly, not a spot of turbulence which was nice. We landed and made out way through the airport and into USA Pre-Clearance, where we waited for an hour in a huge queue in a stupidly hot room. Our turns finally came and Martin and I were separated, I could tell as soon as the immigrations officer looked into my bearded face and saw the Arabic writing of the Jordanian stamp from my last trip there was going to be a problem. After the assault of questions he said firmly,
 "Follow me into the back room please".

I was sat down in front of a large counter and watched the hands on my watch tick by, down to my departure time. Had Martin boarded alone? Does he know where I am? I sat firmly with the fear that I may never get released from here or receive the rubber glove, both of which would seriously ruin my day. After sitting twiddling my thumbs and watching the clock tick by closer and closer to my flight time I was called up to the desk, I was questioned again about who I was, where I was from, what I did for a job and about my parents. Then the phone rang to let me know my flight would not wait for me and it was now leaving. Nice right? Not only that they couldn't tell me if Martin had got on or not, oh and also to let me know they were going to charge me for delaying the plane.

Eventually after talking with the woman at the desk I managed to persuade her that I in fact was not a terrorist and that I needed to call my friend to see if he had boarded. To my surprise she let me. Ring, ring. Please pick up! The phone was about to ring out when he answered, with a worried "Hello?".
I told him what had happened and how he was now going to be escorted back through immigrations to the detention centre where I was being held.

Eventually they let me go, as you can tell from the blogging, and we had to make our way out into the airport lobbies to collect our luggage. Where we were told to return to the flight desk to change onto another later flight. But first, Martin needed a cigarette so we needed to find somewhere to get outside!

We sat in the Dublin air outside of a bus stop while Martin smoked, looking like two hobos settling in the sun getting ready for the cold night ahead. We were getting to the point where we were thinking of turning back and going home, but we had to persevere. So we stood triumphantly in the sun, feeling like a scene from a movie and walked up to the flight desk and asked for our flight change, only to be met with "Ok that's fine but you will be facing a charge of the new flight and a change of flight charge, which equals £450".
"Are you joking? It wasn't even our fault!"
After making our argument I managed to reduce our charge buy £300 so we only had to pay £150, which we were still not happy about as I said before, it wasn't our fault. It was immigrations who held us back.

We boarded our flight after our total bill of £1350, feeling a little worse in the wallet region. Hopefully our money will last until August tenth, otherwise we may have to cut this trip short. But right now, all we could think about was sleep.