Departing From Flock To Fedora 2023 - Part III

After acquiring our boarding passes, Sumantro Mukherjee and I took our boarding passes and we headed into the security checking area. We were instructed to empty our water bottles there and package all the fluids that we were carrying including sanitizing solutions, toothpaste tubes and moisturizing lotions in a Ziploc bag. While my backpack went through the checks just fine, Sumantro's backpack was flagged by the checking machine as there were a bunch of other makeup items he purchased for his fiancee that were not packaged in a Ziploc bag. Once those were packaged, we moved towards the designated gates where our flights were supposed to depart from. Being a small airport, we had to wait for a while before our flights showed up on the informative display.

Strangely enough, there was no departure immigration desk to be seen after getting through the security checking. After leaving my backpack at Sumantro's discretion, I went to look for the directions for the departure immigration desk by asking around the airport staff and shopkeepers. There indeed was none and the only immigration desk that was present at the airport was for the arrival. We figured that it is either not required or it would probably be done at the next layover destination which would be London Heathrow (LHR) for us. On returning to the Sumantro, I even shared my findings about the absence of a departure immigration desk to the Flock To Fedora Matrix channel and got to know that a bunch of attendees had a similar observation.

We were pretty glad to see an energetic Clement Verna finding us in the airport seating area and it was interesting to see a familiar face again from the event. His flight from the morning got cancelled and rescheduled to the afternoon so he had been in the airport since then. Coincidentally, even he would be flying through the layover destination, London Heathrow (LHR) on the same flight as Sumantro and I would be. We caught up on the conversations from the event while we waited for the flight gates to show up on the informative display and at around 0315 pm Ireland Standard Time, we started heading off to the designated gate. With our water bottles filled at the nearby stop, the flight boarding was announced and we joined the queue soon without any delay.

We met the same Aer Lingus official here during the boarding that we met before and she thankfully provided Sumantro and me with adjacent seats. With the boarding finishing by 0330 pm Ireland Standard Time, we decided to catch some sleep before we headed off on a wild goose chase for Sumantro's luggage in the sprawling airport of London Heathrow (LHR). Of course, we could not get some shut-eye - thanks to the children in the seat before us, shouting and screaming throughout the length of the flight. After around one hour and twenty minutes, we touched down at our first layover destination. At around 0530 pm Greenwich Mean Time, we headed straight away through the transfers to the baggage claim area where we would find Sumantro's luggage.

After finding Sumantro's luggage, we waited some more time to see if my luggage would show up and if I needed to manually check it in again like Sumantro had to. The belt soon stopped moving by around 0600 pm Greenwich Mean Time and we figured that my luggage had most likely made its way to the next flight of British Airways automatically. As the designated gates did not appear on the informative displays, we had to manually check in with the assistance of a British Airways official and in turn, we got ourselves a fresh set of boarding passes with seat numbers printed on them. Passing through the security checking area, we made it to the other side of the terminal where we spent some time browsing for snacks and gifts from the Duty-Free stores of the airport.