May the Road Rise to Meet You

I'll begin my Ireland trip on Wednesday.  Unfortunately, we had a short week but the entire school had to stay on Wednesday afternoon from 2-4pm for our British Studies test.  I don't understand why, but you would have thought we were taking the ACT or final exams or something because the whole school made a huge deal about this test.  We even got to look at questions from the past exams to study and I felt like although it wasn't easy, it was just as I expected it should be.  I was so relieved to have it over with because everyone studying was stressing me out!  Afterwards, we ate and packed for Ireland.  We had to take a train into London Gatwick Airport on Wednesday night for our 9:40am flight on Thursday because unfortunately, there aren't trains that go early enough in the morning to get us there on time.  Minor detail that was rather annoying but we figured it out and we just had to deal with sleeping in the airport all night (from arriving at 1am until our plane left at 9).  In the train station we met up with another girl from harlaxton headed to France via the same airport so we formed a group and made our way there to camp out.  Unfortunately, we picked a clean spot to sit on the main floor of the terminal that just happened to be by the door to the underground train.  The door kept opening all night and letting in cold air and then they were also doing construction so we really didn't get any sleep.  After a while, we decided to take a walk to warm up and we realized that if you walked upstairs, it was like a sauna compared to downstairs and we were able to snag some bench space to get a couple hours of sleep before checking in.  We checked in and got through security okay (I was randomly searched but it was no big deal).  We eventually boarded the airplane and took another nap as we flew to Dublin.  It was a beautiful sunshining day an it was really cool to see that outside of the airplane window rather than the dark and rain that we typically have experienced.  We even arrived early which was a plus!