The adventure begins!!!

Flying to Ireland.....
August 17th and 18th

This picture is of Steve, Sheri, and me at the LAX airport-- see? We are making the airport code with our hands!

This has been quite the whirl-wind adventure, and I apologize to everyone for not giving an account of my adventures whilst traveling, however, it has been quite draining!!! So, I am planning on going back to the beginning and recounting my tale. It started on the 17th of August when I had to get to LAX airport at 1:00 p.m. for a flight scheduled to leave at 9:00 p.m. It ended up being delayed till nearly midnight, so needless to say, I was in the airport for quite some time! But I got comfortable and ended up finding a nice little niche where I was able to plug in my laptop and keep myself quite entertained! I even found a friend in a guy named Steve who had a 12 hour layover at LAX and also had the same idea as I did about the laptop. (You would think that these places would have more outlets!!!)
While waiting for the airplane, Sheri and I (one of the girls I am going to Romania with) tried to sneak into some of the First Class VIP lounges—It didn’t work so well as we chickened out at the last minute when we realized that you probably had to show your boarding pass. Oh well. When we went through security we realized the extent of the heightened security on flights going into London by evidence of the military in addition to the regular airport security checking our bags and purses. When we got onto the tarmac, I realized the airplane was not right in front of us as I originally supposed! We had to take a nearly 15 minute bus ride to the largest airplane I have ever seen! It was a 747. The flight over was really nice, we got a dinner around 1 a.m. and then breakfast at 8. It was just weird that we had a snack around three in the morning! But it was really cool because I have never been on a transcontinental flight before. It was really weird to leave at midnight on a 10 and a half hour flight and get into London at 5 p.m. the next night!
The Heathrow airport is HUGE!!! And the security was definitely increased because of recent events. They won’t even let you take on more than one carry on and the one you can take on has to fit in this tiny box—I definitely had to move some stuff around and throw a few things away for my backpack to fit. Unfortunately at this time, Sheri had to check her backpack because it wouldn’t fit regardless of how much she rearranged it. So we had to go off in separate directions in order to catch our connecting flight to Ireland. I didn’t meet up with her until she came running towards me, apparently completely lost, and it was only by chance that she ran into me and we were able to find our terminal. Alas, our four hour layover in the Heathrow airport turned into just over an hour and it was one of the only times I was glad our connecting flight was delayed!!! By the time we got into Ireland it was 10 p.m. and I was ready for a good nights sleep. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what I got…