The two-day flight from Ireland to Boston

It’s always hard leaving home but there was a cruel irony in the way Aer Lingus gave me 48 more hours in Ireland this week.

Just over 100 passengers and I discovered on Wednesday how truly inconvenient it can be to have a flight cancelled during peak season. Although tensions were high, a reassuring camaraderie developed between everyone stranded by whatever mechanical fault befell flight EI 135 to Boston.

Our netherworld didn’t compare to real crises but it did give us all a tiny sense of what Edward Snowden must have gone through in Moscow Airport; we were neither here nor there, we were in a hotel in Shannon.

There we sat in Shannon Airport on Wednesday waiting for our midday flight to begin boarding. Little did we know that there would be eight hours of occasional announcements telling us there’d be an announcement in yet another half an hour.

Soon the company sent out a couple of brave and patient employees to deal with our queries and gripes. There was, they divulged, a ‘spare part’ being flown in from Dublin.

I had enjoyed another mechanical delay in Shannon before and Aer Lingus brought in a spare plane. However, this is August — there was no spare plane to rescue us, nor many spare seats.

Eventually, they conceded defeat and we were given the task of claiming the carefully packed baggage churned out by a plane that never left the ground.

Then the real confusion started. Four hotels may or may not have been informed that four coaches would be arriving with dissatisfied customers who ran the gamut of frustration from resigned to revolution.

Certainly, the incredibly helpful receptionist at the Shannon Court Hotel had no clue about us until she watched with dread as our bus pulled in. From the moment she welcomed us until the following morning when she ushered us on to another coach bound for the Clarion Hotel in Limerick, she did everything with a smile. The Clarion were a little taken aback by our arrival also.

“They’ve booked dinner for you tonight,” the receptionist said on Thursday afternoon as we trooped in, “so that probably means you won’t be flying anywhere today”.

We were becoming more of a group now, the 20 of us that arrived in Limerick. Rumours flew around and one lady took it upon herself to push for information. She was told there might be a replacement plane rented from Titan Airlines and that it would take us out of Shannon on Friday morning. Or then again there might not be.

At about 5pm on Thursday, it was confirmed we would all be leaving Limerick at 6am Friday and that the coach bound for Dublin would get us on the 11.20am flight to Boston.

We got there just in time for the Aer Lingus staff at the gate to say there’d be a 10-minute delay. We had waited two days, we could wait a little longer.