June 5th: Prologue

Since there were no direct flights to Geneva, we chose to fly through Dublin on Aer Lingus. We were driven to SFO by Steve Wang. We arrived at the checkin counter fairly early, and managed to get our bike boxes through oversized baggage in pretty decent time. One weird thing abotu Aer Lingus is that their flight to Dublin departs from the domestic terminal, not the international terminal.

While the flight itself was fine, despite the flight landing early in Dublin, the gate we were supposed to deport through was occupied by a United airlines flight with engine trouble, so we were stuck on the ground for over an hour, which caused us to miss our connector to Geneva.

After we were offboarded, the customer service agents re-routed us through Heathrow to get to Geneva, advising us to get an ETA for the UK. The flight to Heathrow was an ordeal, though the flight to Geneva went relatively smoothly. To this date, Aer Lingus has refused to grant us any compensation for our flight delay, nor have we been reimbursed for the expensive food we had to buy in London due to the delay. This was quite an unpleasant experience, as we landed in Geneva well after 10:00pm.

Fortunately, despite all the crazy transfers, all bike boxes arrived, and the transfer to the hotel went without trouble. We slept as quick as we could but it was already midnight by the time we got settled in.