Jason and I decided that we’d like to try keeping a travel blog for our trip. Whether or not I’ll be able to stick to it is up for debate – it’ll depend on time and energy – but I’m definitely going to try. I’ve been informed by a few people now that a travel blog without pictures isn’t much worth reading, but I’m kind of a stickler about photos: if we’re talking ones from the DSLR, I want to have a chance to post-process. That just isn’t going to happen while we’re traveling – it takes way too much time, and the netbook can’t handle Photoshop.
Compromise: I’m taking pictures (albeit probably crappy ones) with the old cellphone that we brought along for emergency calls, with the promise to upload high quality images once they’re all edited after the trip. If I’d had the foresight to do so, I would’ve brought my Lumia 900, which at least has a wide angle lens and takes quite good pictures, but at the time we were worried about losing it (or having it be stolen) and weren’t thinking about picture quality (or blogging, for that matter).
So, onto the actual travelling! The last couple days are already fading into a blur. We flew out of Seattle at 11:00 am on Thursday and arrived in Dublin at 8 am on Friday – technically midnight in Seattle time. When we landed in Dublin I had to wrap my head around the concept that while Friday had already begun for us a while ago, it had just barely started for everyone back home. At that point Jason was pretty exhausted, though I was riding high on a second (or perhaps third) wind.
The flights were fine except we forgot to fill up our bottles before the flight to Chicago, so I spent a lot of that flight despairing for water – the attendants were sparingly pouring small cups of water because they didn’t have enough to give anyone a full bottle – that is, until I discovered a workaround by the magical name of “club soda”. Is water rationing on flights a recent thing? I seem to recall flights offering bottles of water to people before. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs, though, that there is more than enough soda and juice onboard for everyone to ostensibly have several whole cans, and yet not enough water to go around. Go figure.
We had a layover in Chicago before departing for Dublin. O’Hare was an adventure, and by “adventure” I mean “experience I’d rather not repeat”. We barely made it to our gate – our layover time was eaten up by a late arrival, and it ends up the international terminal is a long walk, four train stops, and an additional security checkpoint away from the domestic arrivals area in which we landed. No amount of signage anywhere indicated how to get to the terminal — much less that it existed! – so the initial confusion also created delay. Lesson learned: have a map of the airport to which you’re traveling. Granted, we had no idea there would be such a time crunch. At least we can count speedwalking as exercise, and success! We actually remembered to fill up the water bottles. This ended up being a very, very good thing given there was also similar water rationing onboard the Dublin flight.
Having never flown for longer than about 5 hours before (and I was very young when I did), a 7 hour international flight (preceded by 4 hour domestic flight, which was preceded by only about 5 hours of sleep) was a mind-bending experience. I felt like I entered some temporal/spatial vortex where after a great deal of rumbling and shaking about we somehow would magically emerge on the other side in another time and place. It was a redeye flight, so there was no visible sense of progress, only engine noise. Though this is likely attributable to lack of sleep, with this came the odd sense that time on the plane stretched out forever – that there was nothing before or after it, just that moment. Sleeping on a plane is also a pretty spaced-out experience in itself. I laid there, drifting in a state that was neither sleep nor full consciousness. I must have slept because 3 hours passed by and it certainly didn’t feel like I’d been lying awake for that long, but time in general seemed to go fuzzy around the edges.
The descent into Ireland was surreally beautiful. A thick blanket of fog obfuscated the ground below, while cloud cover formed a lush white ceiling overhead. As the plane descended between these, early sunrise lightbeams cascaded through the cloud cover, dappling the mist below in sparkling waves.
Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to capture any pictures of the sunbeams, but I still got one of the clouds above and fog below:
Compromise: I’m taking pictures (albeit probably crappy ones) with the old cellphone that we brought along for emergency calls, with the promise to upload high quality images once they’re all edited after the trip. If I’d had the foresight to do so, I would’ve brought my Lumia 900, which at least has a wide angle lens and takes quite good pictures, but at the time we were worried about losing it (or having it be stolen) and weren’t thinking about picture quality (or blogging, for that matter).
So, onto the actual travelling! The last couple days are already fading into a blur. We flew out of Seattle at 11:00 am on Thursday and arrived in Dublin at 8 am on Friday – technically midnight in Seattle time. When we landed in Dublin I had to wrap my head around the concept that while Friday had already begun for us a while ago, it had just barely started for everyone back home. At that point Jason was pretty exhausted, though I was riding high on a second (or perhaps third) wind.
The flights were fine except we forgot to fill up our bottles before the flight to Chicago, so I spent a lot of that flight despairing for water – the attendants were sparingly pouring small cups of water because they didn’t have enough to give anyone a full bottle – that is, until I discovered a workaround by the magical name of “club soda”. Is water rationing on flights a recent thing? I seem to recall flights offering bottles of water to people before. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs, though, that there is more than enough soda and juice onboard for everyone to ostensibly have several whole cans, and yet not enough water to go around. Go figure.
We had a layover in Chicago before departing for Dublin. O’Hare was an adventure, and by “adventure” I mean “experience I’d rather not repeat”. We barely made it to our gate – our layover time was eaten up by a late arrival, and it ends up the international terminal is a long walk, four train stops, and an additional security checkpoint away from the domestic arrivals area in which we landed. No amount of signage anywhere indicated how to get to the terminal — much less that it existed! – so the initial confusion also created delay. Lesson learned: have a map of the airport to which you’re traveling. Granted, we had no idea there would be such a time crunch. At least we can count speedwalking as exercise, and success! We actually remembered to fill up the water bottles. This ended up being a very, very good thing given there was also similar water rationing onboard the Dublin flight.
Having never flown for longer than about 5 hours before (and I was very young when I did), a 7 hour international flight (preceded by 4 hour domestic flight, which was preceded by only about 5 hours of sleep) was a mind-bending experience. I felt like I entered some temporal/spatial vortex where after a great deal of rumbling and shaking about we somehow would magically emerge on the other side in another time and place. It was a redeye flight, so there was no visible sense of progress, only engine noise. Though this is likely attributable to lack of sleep, with this came the odd sense that time on the plane stretched out forever – that there was nothing before or after it, just that moment. Sleeping on a plane is also a pretty spaced-out experience in itself. I laid there, drifting in a state that was neither sleep nor full consciousness. I must have slept because 3 hours passed by and it certainly didn’t feel like I’d been lying awake for that long, but time in general seemed to go fuzzy around the edges.
The descent into Ireland was surreally beautiful. A thick blanket of fog obfuscated the ground below, while cloud cover formed a lush white ceiling overhead. As the plane descended between these, early sunrise lightbeams cascaded through the cloud cover, dappling the mist below in sparkling waves.
Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to capture any pictures of the sunbeams, but I still got one of the clouds above and fog below:
 |
| Clouds above, sun in the middle, and fog below |
From
above, Ireland looked very similar to the more rural parts of Washington state
– lots of greenery, farmland, and a smattering of houses. Some of
our first looks at Ireland from the plane:
 |
| First look from the plane |
 |
| A patchwork quilt of farmland and houses |
Even after we landed – and even now as I’m writing this from
the hotel room – it still hasn’t quite sunk in that we’re in another
country. People drive on the other side of the road, speak differently,
and prices are in Euros rather than dollars, but it still doesn’t yet feel like
we’re really someplace all that different.
This is probably also because we’re kind of in the suburbs right now – the plan
is to lay low today at this airport hotel and pick up the rental car
tomorrow. So, right now the only real venturing out we did was to the
Tesco across the street, which basically felt like a Target, except
(intriguingly enough) they were giving out samples of different kinds of milk.
- Intersections (at least the one we’ve experienced thus far) are very complicated. There were 7 different crosswalks with separate lights you have to go through in order to get to the Tesco that’s located orthogonally across the street from the hotel. It took close to 10 minutes to cross the street the first time, although on the way back we had slightly better luck with timing.
- Brown bread is delicious, and there isn’t anything quite like it in the States (no, not even in the Irish pubs.)
- Band-aids are “plasters”. Laundry detergent is “laundry conditioner”, which was really confusing because that makes it sound like fabric softener.
Miscellaneous travel lessons learned:
- Print maps of unknown airport terminals, or at the very least know how to get to the international departures area.
- Benadryl and OTC sleeping pills are the same drug, but the latter are twice as expensive.
- It’s okay to not have plans on the first day of travel. Driving in an unfamiliar country with different road rules = recipe for disaster.
- Don’t dye your hair right before traveling if the color tends to bleed, otherwise you will undoubtedly end up totally destroying the hotel shower with the eye-searingly bright runoff from your head. This is very, very not good:
 |
| I don't see any problems here. No sir.
(Not sure how we’re going to explain that one to
the hotel (or if we’re just going to try to pretend it didn’t happen – it’s a
lost cause, as are the towels, and the pillowcase, and anything else white I so
much as set my head against at this point.))
|
- Understand how area codes work. We got a SIM card for the phone only to not be able to figure out how to dial anywhere. Thankfully the very kind Vodaphone service rep gave me a crash course on dialing numbers from within Ireland. I had a sinking feeling it was user error from the very start.
- Maybe don’t assume the worst. To alleviate anxiety I try to plan for the worst possible contingency, which in our case was, “they’re going to lose our checked bag.” Result being a lot of redundancy between what was packed in the carry-on versus the checked bag, because, hey, great news – they didn’t lose our bag!
- Having all your confirmations and plans printed out and in one place is an awesome thing. Okay, maybe we overdid it a bit with the epic binder of epicness (while I’m to blame for most of it, I’d like to note that Jason printed out about 40 pages worth of Yelp restaurant reviews and accompanying maps – good LORD):
 |
| At the front: itinerary, booking confirmations, and restaurant information (maps and reviews). Each tab thereafter is for trips (Dublin to Galway, for example), cities, or scenic outings. |
The rest of today is most likely just hanging out in the hotel room and attempting not to zonk out before 9 pm (challenging, given that closing my eyes for a few seconds results in in near-instantaneous sleepytime.) Taking the bus into downtown Dublin is an option, but we’re not sure if we want to tackle that challenge yet or just keep it low key.
Tomorrow is when the real adventure starts. I’m just hoping the driving bit isn’t too eventful – we’ll be doing quite a lot of it. Not reassuring: we witnessed three near-collisions of shuttles in about as many minutes as we left the airport, not to mention large trucks hurtling around tight and narrow street corners at alarming speeds. I looked at Jason and he looked at me with a grin: “This is going to be an adventure!” Manual car, smaller streets, unfamiliar country, and driving on a different side of the road? Yep, definitely an adventure.
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