Our last day and it was hot and busy, along with a very early start of needing to leave the cabin by 8am. Everyone already had there bag packed so that helped things along. We piled the bags in the trailer and ourselves in the minivan. Our first stop of the day was White Plains to drop off Gail and Crew 73’s tents, today was their tent maintenance day before their big summer trip.
That done we all headed to Jones beach on Long Island. This was a gorgeous beach and the guys all seemed to enjoy the huge waves. It was also another beautiful day. We didn’t leave the beach until almost 3pm, when we all realised that we may have underestimated the sun and not used quite enough sun cream. After some quick and in some cases cold showers we were back in the minivan and looking for food before heading to the airport. We stopped in a restaurant called Friendly’s and all had some very nice Ice Cream, after dinner of course.
Next stop was the airport, we were a little late because of traffic and so made a very fast exit from the van once we got there. But I will say here thank you Mike and crew 73 for all of your help and hospitality.
Anyway into the Delta building at JFK and yet another self check in system to tackle. Kevin and I set about getting everyone checked in and then I found a Delta representative to make sure that we would make our flight despite the very long queues for bag drop. She said that we had nothing to worry about, but none the less a different representative had opened a new desk in order to help us organise our bags. This was great and we were all in the queue for security in no time at all. Security here seemed to be much more efficient than in Detroit and we were all out the other side very quickly. We got to the gate just in time to board or so we thought, this was when we discovered that our flight was delayed. This allowed me time to go and find some much needed after sun cream and water for those of us who were by now suffering quite alot from sun burn of varying degrees.
Eventually (almost 4 hours later) we were finally ready to board our plane home. Once on the plane I (and most others) went straight to sleep. For those who stayed awake there was food and two or three films to watch on screens throughout the plane. But as I said I was asleep for the whole flight. We landed in Dublin at about 10.30am local time and were all happy to be back. We found the baggage carousel (via the toilets for our mandatory group excursion) and waited for our bags to appear. Once we had all of our bags we went to meet all of the people who were waiting for us in Arrivals. Without much delay except for a photo we all headed home.
That is the end of our trip, I will hopefully have more photos up in the next couple of days, I hope you have enjoyed reading the blog, I have certainly enjoyed writing it.