I may be alone in this, but nothing brings out excitement in my soul quite like arriving at an airport. The anticipation of travel is at its highest and you are so close to beginning your amazing journey. At the same time, leaving behind loved ones that you would like to take with you is a difficult experience in itself. Saying goodbye to my mom and Daniel for two weeks was no fun, but Europe was awaiting my arrival!
After a short flight to Newark, New Jersey we settled in for a long 5 hour layover before beginning our international flight. It was a fight for food and charging stations. I stuffed myself with an amazing cheeseburger and grabbed the first plug in station that I could find to charge up my phone for the flight. We borded around 6:40, but did not actually take off until an hour after our intended departure time, due to a faulty coffee maker. Once we were in the air though I tried to settle in and enjoy the luxury of having my own tv screen to choose movies from, but nothing seemed to settle me. It was a long 7+ hour flight that involved very little sleep. But Ireland was on the horizon, so I cannot complain.
Once we arrived in Shannon, Ireland we hooked up with our guide for the tour, Gavin and loaded up in our coach. I have to give mad props to the guys in our group for hauling all our luggage in and out of the coach for two weeks. We took a brief stop at a medieval castle called Bunratty and then continued on to our first stop of the trip, Killarney. Killarney is a beautiful, quaint town with lots of things to see. We ate up a lot of our day making our way from Shannon to Killarney, so we when got to the town we settled into our hotel and set out to see a little bit of the town itself. This was one of the things that I liked best about our trip. We sort of settled into the trip slowly and built up to the larger experiences. This gave our bodies time to recover and adjust.
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| Bunratty Castle |
My first meal in Ireland was at a little local pub called Tatler Jack. My goal for the trip was to eat only at places that were local or native only to Europe. I mean who goes to Europe to eat Burger King? BK did seem to be very big in Ireland though, there was one on every street corner. At Tatler Jack's I decided on a loaded spud with Bacon and Cheese. The bacon in Ireland is more like ham and while I had to take some of it off, because it was so thick, the taste of the spud and salad was delicious!
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| Tatler Jack |
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping, sight-seeing, and napping. Napping is not ideal on your first day after traveling a long distance, because you don't want to get your body off schedule. However, when you are tired, you cannot resist the comforts of a soft bed, especially considering your last bed was an airplane set (that would not recline)! We had dinner that night at a restaurant near by and I am sad to report it was not much worth mentioning. We found from day one that most of our dinners in the UK and Ireland consisted of vegetable soup, some type of meat and potato dish, and was rounded out with ice cream. My fellow teacher and roommate on the trip settled into our rooms around 6:30 and woke up at 10:30 realizing that we had unintentionally slept the evening away. We quickly changed for bed and turned out the lights, because we had a big day of exploring the Ring of Kerry on the agenda for the next day.
See you guys tomorrow for Day 3 & 4!
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