We're here!

As of about 5 hours ago, we’ve made it to Ireland. Here are the highlights so far…

• We all made it through security with one minor glitch…Andy had a bit of a run-in with the hurculean TSA officer who happened to find a pocket knife in his carry-on. Knife was confiscated and thankfully, no one was cuffed.
• Per Delta’s flight screen monitors, we made our way to Gate E 4. Once we arrived at Concourse E (which happens to be the farthest possible gate in ATL), the flight monitors said T 4. So, thinking they had made a gate change, we made the mile long trek back to the T gates. Well guess what…once we got there, the monitors at T gates still said E 4. Hooray for technology. We finally asked someone, and got made our flight.
• For some reason, within 5 minutes of us being on the plane, two of the flight attendants had already dubbed us as “trouble makers”. I think it had something to do with Andy turning on the flight attendant call button several times accidentally with his elbow. For the rest of the flight, any time someone hit the call button, Andy and I held our hands up in innocence.
• We watched “The Bucket List”, and it inspired us to create a list of our own. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it more, but we’ve come up with quite a lengthy list of things we have to do while in Ireland for the next 9 days.
• I only scored about 20 or 30 minutes of sleep during the 8 hour flight…it was pretty tough getting comfortable. I thought I was in the perfect sleeping position at one point, but after a quick nap I woke up and couldn’t move my hands. I had a bad case of limb-bloat…my watch didn’t hardly fit anymore because my hands and arms had swollen so bad.
• After walking around the plane trying to cure my limb-bloat, I finally calmed down and tried to get some more sleep. It was then that the guy sleeping across the aisle from me was unknowingly pressing the reading light button with his leg. It turned on, then off, on, then off for a solid 20 minutes. I didn’t really want to wake him, and it didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else, so I just accepted that we in Row 30 had our very own strobe light. It wasn’t very conducive to sleeping, however.
• Going through Customs and all in Dublin was a breeze…we didn’t even get sniffed by dogs or anything. Figuring out the rental car thing took a little work, but Andy’s a pro at driving on the left side of the road. I’m still a bit nervous, because I’m going to have to drive soon.
• We ended up in a neat little town called Kildare, where we found a tourist information office. You can spot them along the way by the big signs that have an “I” with a circle around it. We were having so much fun trying to figure out how to navigate the town that parking took a bit of work. After we drove by the same information office the 4th time, we finally managed to figure out how to park and go in. The lady in there was super helpful though.

As I type now, we’re at some of Anne’s relative’s house (Michael & Jean). I met them last year at Andy & Anne’s wedding, and they’re super nice people. We just had some quiche & tea, and now everybody’s laying down for a nap to try and curb any jet lag. We’re having dinner later with Michael, Jean and her Mum. I think we’re spending the night here, then going to Wexford tomorrow.

The weather’s a little overcast, but the scenery is gorgeous! I’ll leave you with a few pics so far…