Thanks again, everyone, for all the great help and suggestions! Can't wait to meet everyone.

Well, woot, looks like you face having to put up with me, too! I called United and they had zero problems shifting my outbound trip into Amsterdam arriving 7/4. I need to make sure that I attend to an appropriate amount of job-hunting behavior during the course of my trip, but I'm thinking that the chances are about 99% that I won't pay the hotel for nothing -- that i'll actually show up.

When the itinerary e-mail came though, I thought they would delete all of my outbound from the ticket, but no. The "before" was

7/7 Seattle->London/LHR
7/8 LHR-->Dublin
7/15 Dublin-->LHR-->Seattle

The "After" is

7/3 Seattle->AMS
7/8 LHR-->Dublin
7/15 Dublin-->LHR-->Seattle

So they left that Heathrow-->Dublin hop on the ticket. Soooooo, where I initially figured I would just try to get a cheap flight from AMS to Dublin on the 6th or 7th, it now looks like it might not be a bad thing to just mosey to London and pick up the itinerary there.

Sooooo (whew, can I be more wordy??) one aspect of this is that if there's anyone heading back to England (pretty much any destination) on the eve of 6th or on the 7th and who thinks they can stand *another* tobacco-spittin' Amurrican passenger, give me a yell. I'd split the ferry and gas, of course, and it would be cool to see that new ferry if that's how it goes.

This could be very cool. I have committed to breaking my 2-month-long beer fast on this trip!