Potatoes

I watched Home Alone as a child (and probably every year since then when it airs before Christmas) in both home alone films (I am glad they decided that 2 films was plenty and that there was no reason to make any more) there are scenes where the family has to run through the airport as they are extremely late. Haha, what a scene, it would NEVER happen in real life though.

2012 now and rather than a city break, this time we were having more of a countryside break, part of my family harks from Ireland (this obviously makes me Irish - As any racist or any person with Scottish or Irish parents will tell you, nationality is genetic and not based on anything silly like where you're born) and I had never been to Ireland (this point is irrelevant in the above nationality claim), so that was the plan. We booked the flights to Knock, my dad and Gill made reservations at a B&B in Ballaghaderreen (I think).

We always make sure to get to the airport nice and early, it doesn't matter if we have to wait a little bit in the airport. As it turned out, the same was not necessarily true of our travelling companions, who were working and sleeping in the morning while we packed our bags and watched the clock creep ever closer to the time of the flight. There was about an hour left when they arrived to take us all to the airport, since we didn't have any checked bags, we could still make it in time provided there were no more delays.

Unfortunately, there were to be many more delays. It turned out that on this day, the grass in the middle of the road was being cut near the airport, which is all well and good, except that they have to close a lane, which causes queues in the other lanes. Upon arriving at the airport, the first task was to park the car, finding where needed to happen, parking and returning all passengers to the airport was a good way to bleed away most of the remaining minutes just to make sure it was almost impossible to get on that plane.

But we were certainly going to try. We hurried up the escalators and towards the airport security, hopefully there wouldn't be a queue! Ha! As if it would have been that easy, of course there was a queue, a huge queue! Well that was it, no chance of making it through that, never mind we did try.

Wait, express tickets, for £4 a piece we could jump to the front of this queue, most of the time, this seems like a cockish thing to do, just wait it out with everyone else, but these were extenuating circumstances, this was our one hope, there wasn't even enough time to figure out the ticket barriers for it, just push on through with the alarms blaring. There were annoyed people in the queue who thought we were pushing in, they were right of course, but we had paid for the privilege.

"Manders, Morris, Finn and Finn, please go to gate **" We were being called, we were so close, but we were still on our way through the security checkpoint, where the man using the manual metal detector did not feel the same urgency as us to get us through. My dad and Gill went ahead in an effort to hold the plane for us, while I waited for my bag to come through the scanner, it did where it was separated from the other bags waiting for a manual check in an area I could not reach, where there was a member of staff refusing to react to this new object in her work area, as our names were called again, I felt the need to ask her to hurry, which went completely unappreciated.

Eventually my belongings were returned and we were given the opportunity to step into the part of the buildings with the gates at almost exactly the moment the aircraft was supposed to taxi-ing towards the runway, we were out of time, but we felt there had to still be a chance, cue the recreation of Home Alone as we ran through the airport towards the gate... Well towards a gate anyway, the wrong gate, meaning we had to turn around and run even further, we arrived at the gate just as our entire party was about to be completely turned away for good, but they did allow it, they opened the gate and let us through, we had made it, it was touch and go, but we made it, the staff were trying to hurry us, but we had made it this far, they were already waiting for us to board and we were outside, they weren't about to turn us away now.

As part of the lineage tour of the area, we came to this house, I believe it was where my Grandmother grew up and I am also of the belief it has seen better days, though I think they were quite a long time ago now.

I also found where duplicates of me were being grown in pots. That one looks about ready for picking.