Awhile ago, I had told Greg that if he ever gets the chance to travel overseas for work that my answer is most likely, “YES!” (With the idea that I can hopefully tag along.) Well, our opportunity finally arrived! His company needed to send several people to Dublin, Ireland, for a week! We are so thankful that Grammy and Grampy can watch the girls for us so that Greg and I can take our first trip alone – without children – in over 14 years! And it’s our first trip overseas! And it *almost* coordinates with our 20th anniversary, so we are counting it as an early gift! (And technically, this week will be the anniversary of when Greg proposed, so close enough.)
I drove the girls out to Kansas on Thursday, after their electives school was finished.
We arrived sometime after midnight. Then I drove the eight hours back to Denver on Friday. I had to make a lot of stops on the way home to walk around so I could stay alert!
We left Denver on Saturday morning (September 14th) around 10am, via Uber. We had a flight booked to Washington, DC, and then from there, to Dublin, Ireland. Unfortunately, our first flight was delayed several times. We had built in a little over 3 hours for a layover to give us a cushion, but after the last delay, we had to practically run to the next gate to catch our international flight! It had already started boarding and everything. That was very stressful, but we made it. And for some reason, even though we had booked seats together, Greg’s seat assignments had been changed. We didn’t mind for the first flight, but we asked someone to switch on the international (6 hour / overnight) flight and thankfully, someone did, so that we could sit together. And as luck would have it, the third person in our little section was a young man from Dublin. He was very friendly and gave us several ideas of things we could do while visiting.
Our flight from DC to Dublin left at 10pm local time (so 8pm Denver time) so Greg and I weren’t tired yet. So we both watched Captain Marvel. We were also very thankful that a light dinner was served since, in our rush between flights, we hadn’t had time to grab anything to eat. After the movie, we tried to get some sleep since we knew we would lose hours on the flight east. I don’t think we slept much though. Our flight arrived in Dublin around 9:30am local time.
We then grabbed a taxi to the Temple Bar area of Dublin, where our AirBnB is located. I am glad we were able to check into the one-bedroom apartment early so that we didn’t have to carry our heavy luggage around with us for more than a couple of hours.
We tried our hardest to stay awake all day so that we could adjust to our new schedule, but alas, we started fading fast. We rode one of the hop on/hop off double-decker buses, had dinner at a Sheehans Pub (Fish n Chips for me, Irish Stew for Greg), but could barely keep our eyes open. We eventually gave in and went back to the apartment and went to bed around 5pm local time!
