I meant to do quick update posts here and there while we were away, but….I didn’t. Alas. We just got back two days ago from our 3 1/2 week England and Ireland trip, and it was both awesome and more stressful than an average trip. Or maybe it was exactly as stressful as an average trip? Given our car trouble and bedbug filled Disney trip last fall, maybe this is just the new normal? We will hope not.
So the trip involved Dave losing both his Chase Sapphire card (the one without international transaction fees and the one that covered our Ireland rental car so we didn’t have to buy the expensive insurance) AND his driver’s license (you know–the thing he needed so that I wouldn’t be the one who had to drive all over England and Ireland) somewhere on the way over. Turns out it was on the first of our three planes, as we discovered after we got home when JetBlue e-mailed to say they’d found them.
Not this plane:
Chase overnighted a new credit card very quickly and that wasn’t much of a problem. The license was a bit more complicated, as there is, apparently, NO WAY to put a rush on a new driver’s license, no matter how panicky your wife is at the thought of driving on the left. They told Dave on the phone that it would take two weeks to get a new license, and that they could only mail it to a Georgia address. So I drove in England. And I did fine! It was not so bad!
Ireland was another story. Which is why I was so very happy when the replacement license showed up after a few days and NOT 2 weeks, and my friend Tracy overnighted it to us in Dublin, and I didn’t have to play chicken with the tour buses on the narrow roads of Ireland at all! Dave, who had started out all excited about the novelty of driving in the UK and Ireland, admitted the night before we picked up our Ireland car that he was nervous about driving after watching me do it in England because, “it looked hard.” And I thought I was doing such a great job that I made it look easy!
The other big bummer of the trip was that Dave’s mom had some health problems just before they were supposed to leave, and they weren’t able to come to Ireland as planned (she’s doing much better now!) This was supposed to be a trip for the whole extended family (us, Dave’s sister and her family, and Nana and Grandpa), and we’d been planning it together for a long time, so this was a huge disappointment for everyone. But, of course, we are very glad that Dave’s mom is feeling better now, and we’re very grateful that we were able to make the trip and spend time with some of the family (and some hawks):
So I’ll be going into lots more detail about everything later, but I wanted to do a quick recap for now. And I’m still finishing Canada posts (I didn’t mean for that to happen!) so I think I’ll alternate back and forth lest I eventually end up blogging about things that happened six years ago.
Whirlwind recap: we started off the trip with 10 days in England with just our family before meeting up with everyone else in Ireland. We spent 5 nights in London first, seeing many museums. We all loved London, but this was when all the stressful stuff was happening (and we were pretty exhausted for the first couple of days), so we’ll have to do it again sometime under more relaxing circumstances:
We stopped by the Maritime Museum as soon as we got off the plane; we had several hours to kill before we could check in to our AirBnB. It was very nice, but hard to enjoy, because we were exhausted:
The British Museum was awesome and very, very crowded:
Oh, I forgot! The other stressful thing was my camera died on me while we were waiting in line for Westminster Abbey. I bought a new one in Bath, because what am I going to do? Go to Ireland without a working camera?
Everyone loved the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was like the British Museum without the crowds. Also, they had really well done activity backpacks for Abe to check out:
The Tower of London was a bit of a bust because it was very crowded and also rainy and cold. We didn’t last terribly long there, but we did get a picture with this elephant:
Next up was Bath, with a stop at Stonehenge on the way. We all loved Bath. Our hotel came with a breakfast hamper, which, it turns out, is a magical, unending supply of food. It was great.
Our last stop in England was in Bakewell, in the Peak District, where we explored the town and walked to the very grand Chatsworth House and met a lot of sheep on the way (I often felt like we’d mostly gone to Europe to meet as many animals as possible):
And then we took the ferry to Dublin! (plus three trains. That was a long day). The kids were reunited with their California cousins and we walked around Dublin a whole lot.
The AirBnB had a pool table!
Then we picked up another rental car and drove to Killarney, with a stop in Adare on the way to see our first castle ruins. Killarney was lovely.
And then the last stop was Oughterard–a little town about half an hour outside of Galway, on the edge of Connemara. We had a full week here, and we saw a ton. We went into Galway one day, took a boat to the Aran islands, checked out beaches and castles and gardens and hawks….
And then home! And now we have a whole week at home before we leave (with the trailer again, finally) for Milo’s week of music camp in North Carolina.
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