Late checkout bought me one more unhurried morning, and I spent longer than I meant to deciding what to do with it: a quick DART ride to the coast, one more museum, or just Trinity and Temple Bar again, slower this time, without a schedule attached. Familiar won. I went back to Trinity College's cobbled quad and another slow pass through Temple Bar before either of them turned into places I had actually said goodbye to. Trinity's Old Library was as far as curiosity took me, the Long Room's shelves stacked floor to ceiling in the specific way that makes a room feel older than it probably is.
I collected my bag from the hostel one last time and weighed the usual options out of habit, bus or a car, before settling on the thirty minute ride out to the airport that turned out to be the shortest and calmest airport transfer of this entire trip, which felt almost suspicious after everything else it had put me through.
Aer Lingus check in and security both moved fast enough that I had time for a proper lunch instead of the usual airport compromise of whatever was closest to the gate, and then came the part of Dublin Airport that makes it unusual among European airports: U.S. preclearance, a full immigration and customs check completed before boarding, queues and all, so the flight lands in America already legally arrived. Smooth on both sides, immigration and flight alike, the calmest travel day of the entire five weeks saved for the very last one.
We landed in Philadelphia at seven in the evening, an ocean and five weeks away from the E train I had boarded to start all of this. The plan from there was a nine o'clock Amtrak north, enough of a gap after landing to clear customs and find the platform without rushing. The board had other ideas. Delayed, then delayed again, each update pushing the number back until eleven was the actual departure, two hours later than booked for reasons nobody at the station explained or seemed particularly bothered by. I found a bench, made peace with the wait, and watched a one hour journey turn into something considerably longer once the delays already stacked against it kept compounding past Trenton. I reached Newark somewhere near one in the morning.
The last delay of an entire five week trip happened forty minutes from home, which felt like the itinerary's idea of a joke.
End of travel, on paper. In practice it ended somewhere on a quiet platform in Newark, past midnight, too tired to feel anything specific about being back, already half asleep on my feet the same way I had been on a red eye out of JFK five weeks and one very long loop around the northern half of the world ago.
