By Akashdeep Dhar in Flock To Fedora 2023 —

Departing From Flock To Fedora 2023 - Part II

Sumantro and I bade farewell to a bunch of folks leaving either on the same day or the next day while we waited in the reception area for our taxi to arrive. Things started getting messier when we decided to check in for a set of long flights and we feared that we might lose our luggage again.

Departing From Flock To Fedora 2023 - Part II
From left to right - Amita Sharma, Nikita Tripathi, Sumantro Mukherjee, Anushka Jain and Akashdeep Dhar at the entrance of the hotel

Amita Sharma, Anushka Jain and Nikita Tripathi were staying back for a day longer, so they were on their way out to see the city. After some photographs clicked, Nikita mentioned her willingness to work on the Fedora Badges revamp project codebase development. At around 1100 am Ireland Standard Time, Sumantro Mukherjee and I bade them farewell and took our seats in the waiting area. Here I met with Eric Curtin who was also planning on checking out on the same day and we discussed the progress made in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Automotives project. We also discussed the choice of build tools for building operating system images, following up on the morning discussion that I had about the same topic with Davide Cavalca.

From left to right - Mike Nolan and Akashdeep Dhar munching on some of the enticing bakery products made available in the dining area

In the meantime, I also met up with Mike Nolan who also had checked out by then and was preparing to leave for the train station. With some photographs clicked and discussions shared with Mike, I sat down to put some of my purchased collectibles in my luggage that I retrieved from the reception area. I ensured to make some space for the purchases from the Duty-Free stores in the airports. Soon after that, Matthew Miller came down to the reception to check out of the hotel and we bade him farewell too after discussing the event for a while. Being in the hotel waiting area, Sumantro and I were constantly meeting with the attendees who were heading out and so the next ones we ended up meeting were Brian Exelbierd and his family.

From left to right - A sneaky Sumantro Mukherjee, an energetic Matthew Miller and a goofy Akashdeep Dhar at the reception area of the hotel

At around 1200 pm Ireland Standard Time, we met up with Justin W. Flory with whom I got to share a victory that I had during the event. Once we were through with our farewells, I booked myself an Uber ride from the hotel to the Cork Airport (ORK). The ride arrived at the entrance in about ten minutes after being ordered and after having our luggage placed in the taxi, it was time for us to depart. The traffic was pretty thin on the sunny afternoon and it took us no longer than fifteen minutes to reach the airport. We decided to check our luggage in as quickly as possible when we were told by the Aer Lingus official that our luggage would have to be collected and rescanned at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (BOM) as the first Indian entry point.

From left to right - A sleep deprived Justin W. Flory and a barely awake Akashdeep Dhar at the reception area of the hotel

Our itinerary included, first, flying from Cork Airport (ORK) to London Heathrow (LHR), then, flying from London Heathrow (LHR) to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (BOM) and finally, flying from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (BOM) to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (CCU). As the immigration process and the customs check would take place at the first Indian entry point, the point of us having to get our luggage checked in again in Mumbai made sense. To our chagrin, it was revealed to us at around 1230 pm Ireland Standard Time that Sumantro's luggage would require manual check-in in London for the subsequent flights and it felt to us like we might end up losing our luggage again.