My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

To Greece by train - and other journeys of the mind, body and soul

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Pre-clearance

July 8th, 2011 by chris · 3 Comments · flights, travel, USA

Arrived in Chicago last night after a reas­on­ably stress-free jour­ney. The sys­tem in Dublin is that you get grilled and fin­ger­prin­ted in “US Pre-clear­ance”. We thought this just meant the first stage of the pro­cess, but actu­ally when we go here, we found that we had already cleared cus­toms and immig­ra­tion, and that it was actu­ally treated as a domest­ic flight. It makes sense I sup­pose — bet­ter than fly­ing people across the Atlantic if you’re not going to let them in. It was a bit odd to see Obama’s pic up on the wall in Dublin air­port though.

So we got out of the air­port quite quickly, and found the place where the shuttle minibuses to take you to hotels were. We spot­ted the one for Comfort Inns and jumped in and a friendly driver with an incom­pre­hens­ible accent whisked us to a hotel. The only prob­lem was that it was the wrong hotel — we ought to have been at the Comfort Suites. It seems that like domain names, names for hotels are in short sup­ply. Nobody wants to be Heartbreak Hotel, Irritation Inn or even Mild Annoyance Motel (though I have stayed in some of those places, believe me).

Mike came to res­cue us any­way and we were soon cor­rectly installed. Nature encountered so far includes pois­on ivy (seen but not touched!) and fire­flies on sub­urb­an lawns, which are a delight.

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3 Comments so far ↓

  • Margaret Bradshaw

    Man, fire­flies are the best!!

    Folk in the UK really don’t tend to know what they’re miss­ing (re fireflies).

    Enjoy!

  • Jill Dyall

    Brilliant idea to clear cus­toms etc before you arrive in USA!
    Fireflies are bril­liant. Love to every­one and have a great stay in Hastings.

  • Rona

    Lovely pic up there: what a sur­prise and delight to see Als former T shirt has gone to amer­ica!! and he nev­er has!

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