After a fantastic week in Ireland, we caught the Dublin city bus to the airport on 8/23 and Sarah and I said goodbye to Andrea till we would meet again in Austria! We caught our 9:10pm flight to London and arrived late. Initially Sarah and I were thinking to stay inside security and pick up our bags from left luggage in the morning before our 7:40 flight, but that decision wasn’t apparently ours to make since we suddenly found ourselves outside security and therefore unable to go back in. We quickly made our way through London’s huge airport in order to get our luggage before they closed at 11 o’clock. It was a pretty long and tiring excursion to British Airways’ check in, we were doing a lot of running and sweating, but we were thankful to avoid running through the airport, during the morning rush before our 7:40 flight. At this point the airport was basically empty and we found a corner with a row of chairs and about five other people sleeping in the airport for the night as well.

We met two nice guys from Detroit, Michigan who were headed back to the States in the morning. We set up camp and actually got about 3 ½ hours of sleep… not bad for sleeping in the airport. We had some trouble falling asleep at first and were a little paranoid about our luggage but at least our most valuable stuff was secure to our bodies. Our American friends were planning to stay awake all night, but we woke up at 5am to them sleeping :P When we arrived in Vienna, we met a huge group of Franciscan students and hopped on our two hour bus to Gaming. I can’t even describe the feeling of getting to the Kartause, this was going to be our home for the next three months. We found our room on the third floor, room 307. We made sure to get to bed at a decent time since tomorrow we were getting up early to visit Melk Abbey and Dürnstein not too far from Gaming in Austria.