Ireland

I’m going to start with a basic outline of the trip to Ireland and then I’ll come back and fill in the spaces and add some pictures.

I got a wild hair that I wanted to go meet a good friend of mine, and also that I really needed to get out of the country for a while. So, back in February, I went to Ireland with two of my very good friends. It was an amazing trip? but true to this website’s title it was fraught with misadventure. We ended up leaving home early because our original flight was delayed…but we could get on an earlier flight. Well then we landed in London…but yeah. We landed in the middle of a very bad tropical tornado. I didn’t even know there was such a thing, but apparently there are tropical tornadoes.

That tropical tornado grounded us in London for three days and kept us from getting our luggage. It shouldn’t have been three days, but we weren’t able to get back out onto another flights because of airline complications. So, we took advantage of our time in London and did some things that we wouldn’t have gotten to do (because we had a very short layover scheduled). We went to Windsor Castle, saw Stonehenge (taking a super cool back way since it was already closed and we still wanted to see it), went into London and took an actual tour by bus (you know those cool double decker buses you see in the movies? Yeah we took one of those).

We finally made it out to Dublin only my luggage didn’t arrive in Dublin. My friend’s luggage did but mine did not. I’ve already been without my luggage for three days and my body decided it wanted to have a panic attack in the middle of the airport. So I made the decision that I wasn’t going to go on a road trip with my friends like we originally planned. They were not pleased that I was going to stay behind, but they were understanding and they went by themselves.

I had no clothes, I was not clean, I was unhappy. But my Irish friend in a wonderful act of chivalry came to my rescue to take me to go purchase some clothing. He was very busy trying to move, and I really appreciated that he just came…rather than listening to me tell him that I would be fine everything was OK. I spent the next couple days getting over my panic attack and working on my dissertation. After my friends came back they told me all about their part of the trip we talked about the fact that I’d had a panic attack. We also talked about what we wanted to do for the rest of the week and we made our plans. So we planned on going to Powerscourt Estate (the grounds were phenomenally gorgeous) and doing some touring in Dublin. We made reservations at the Jameson distillery and for a dark Ireland storytime at the Leprechaun Museum (my friend joined us for that activity which was a lot of fun), plotted a visit to the crypt mummies, planned an entire day walking around Dublin (so much walking my feet hurt so bad), and reserved a Dublin after Dark walking tour (where they talked about the murders and what not that happened in Dublin while we walked around the city).

Traveling with my friends was really nice they were good travel companions we didn’t fight we communicated well…even when I got a little hangry they listened and we went and got some food. It was really delightful. Unfortunately, when we tried to leave we didn’t realize that we needed to get PCR tests for COVID because the embassy said one thing but the state department said something else entirely different. Then turns out that one of my friends ended up with COVID. So because I was starting a new job, I went home and my friends stayed in Dublin.

They sent me pictures almost every day. They stayed at a farm cottage. It looks like they had so much fun. I really wanted to stay with them, but I needed to come back and start my new job I’m happy to say that they both came back healthy and happy. I definitely want to go back to Ireland someday. I could honestly see myself living there, but I don’t know if that would ever happen. It was very nice to finally get to meet my friend. It made me like an appreciate him as a person even more than I already did.

I feel very lucky that I have such good people in my life.