June 13 : Flight To Dublin

 If this experience is the new post Covid normal, then I will need to take a tranquilizer before taking a trip. This could only be described as torture.

Our flight was from Toronto to Dublin via Air Canada. We left from Terminal One at Pearson Airport. We had heard that clearing security could take an extremely long time, so we arrived an extra hour early to book in. At the check-in kiosk, the scanner for our passport and Covid vaccine documents was flaky. We eventually needed assistance from the Air Canada staff to complete the process.  At the security gate, it went very smoothly. Unbelievably for the entire terminal there was only one gate open, and you could see that line behind us was getting much longer.

We then went to the departure area to wait to board the plane. The food court was ridiculous. For all the passengers leaving Toronto on Air Canada to international destinations, excluding the USA, there were only three restaurants. It took Marg 45 minutes in line to get a hamburger and it took me thirty minutes to get a bowl of rice and overcooked chicken. You could not even find a place selling sandwiches and there was no Tim Hortons, which I thought it was against the law in Ontario.

The departure lounge was a dangerous joke. There was not enough seating for all the passengers and there were three flights leaving at around the same time from adjacent gates. So, there were approximately five hundred, or more, people jammed into an area that should have only held about half that many. There was no staff available to control this mob. It was so jammed with standing passengers waiting to be called for boarding, that I was surprised no one was hurt. 

When we arrived in Dublin, it took about thirty minutes to clear the plane. We ended up at the gate farthest from customs, so it was easily a ten-minute walk to Irish Customs. Clearing customs was quite easy and did not take long. Then when we got to the baggage claim area, we discovered that they hadn't even started unloading our luggage. It took another thirty minutes to claim our suitcases.

So, the trip from home to the hotel in Dublin took 17½ hours of which only 5½ hours were in the air.