I play Pokemon Go, something I am neither proud nor ashamed of. I feel like there is a stigma about us Pokemon Goers, but if I try to make that into a joke segment of this book it will hit with only a small crowd, so it’s not worth mentioning…much. But I will bring it up briefly because it is relevant to this portion of my book. There isn’t a wide enough audience to justify dedicating an entire chapter to it; very few readers would heartily guffaw from those jokes. So when we got to the airport I didn’t expect to run into my cousin and his wife, even though they were leaving Colorado to fly to D.C. on the same day we were. If both of our flights were out of some Podunk little airport in middle of nowheresville, sure. But in this case, it was D.I.A., or the Denver International Airport, for those unfamiliar with airport acronyms.
On a “slow” day, there are hundreds of flights and thousands of travelers. To get to your departure gate, you take an underground train to one of three concourses. So, with all that considered, it was rather bizarre that we got off the train and onto the escalator immediately behind my cousin and his wife. Here is where the Pokemon Go enters the story; after my husband noticed we were behind my cousin and we exchanged shocked pleasantries, my cousin asked us if we were there JUST to play Pokemon Go. I mean…we were definitely playing it, but the thought of someone going to DIA, a place which takes an hour drive to get to, SOLE LY to play a somewhat infantile game, would be a bit insane.
Anyhow, we parted ways at the top of the escalator to go to our gate. Quick sidenote; we decided to go to Chick-Fil-A, and there was legitimately a meal that cost $6.66. That one can’t be popular at a place that Is basically catholic or Christian cultish. Of course, that part of the menu was photographed. I mean, how difficult would it be to make the cost of the meal $6.67? Or $6.68? I honestly believe that if they added one cent to the meal price they would notice an uptick in purchases by their cult followers who would be opposed to a meal priced with the mark of the beast.
Another hilarity to me was my husband going through security. While waiting for our bags to go through the scanner, he noticed that someone had attempted to bring a full sized tube of toothpaste that they had to discard and it was on the floor since they had poor aim and missed the trash. I asked who in their right mind would attempt to bring something like that through security since, as we all know, some super awesome terrorist decided to complicate liquid-airport security relations. I made a comment about that, and Zack saw it and said “well, maybe it is a bomb.” (Yeah, Crest EXPLOSIVE paste! Or, Crestsplosion!) I hung my head for a second. That’s like yelling fire in a crowded theater. There are some words you don’t say while going through airport security; bomb, explosives, weapon, stab, trafficking, stalking, “can’t believe that made it through,” etc. Thankfully, he didn’t say it too loudly.
Anyhow, let’s fast-forward to the gate and the first of two flights to Dublin. We boarded in group 2, which I guess is semi-elite and surprising due to our economy-priced tickets. Surprisingly, the plane was a three seat per side and four seat in the middle situation, which was odd for such a short flight but whatever. Maybe the plane had international plans after us, which would have been convenient if it were going to Dublin. We watched Napoleon Dynamite together during the flight, and man, that movie is fuckin’ hilarious no matter how many times you watch it. It is truly an underrated cinematic masterpiece.
We unintentionally timed the film perfectly to the duration of the flight. Mad skill right there. We landed in Dulles, Washington D.C., with the perfect amount of layover time. After we deplaned, we waited for my cousin and his wife, briefly said another of many goodbyes, and walked down the terminal to our gate. Basically right as we arrived, our second flight was boarding.
Ready with Our Passports!
I hate flying. I always have, and always will, despite having been on hundreds of planes. Turbulence freaks me out. I even have “there’s always turbulence” tattooed on my arm, lyrics from my friend’s song “Turbulence” (shout out, Lauren!). I lived with aerospace engineering students while I was earning my super-useful Spanish undergraduate degree and they explained it as the same as a car hitting a pothole, which didn’t ease my nerves at ALL. I mean, no metal object the size of any plane should be airborne. I don’t understand it and never will.
That’s why they serve you free alcohol on international flights! This time we watched 50 First Dates, for me for the millionth time, for Zack, I am unsure. I decided to go down a VERY deep rabbit hole regarding that movie. Skip the next paragraph if you have never seen it (because you live under a rock) and hate spoilers.
So the basic concept is that Henry Roth (Adam Sandler), a total playboy, falls for a woman, Lucy (Drew Barrymore), and later finds out that she has a memory-loss condition caused by a stray cow-induced car accident and can’t remember anything following the day before the accident. This in and of itself makes zero sense, because why wouldn’t she remember the hours of the day leading up to the crash? The neurologist she sees explains it as her slate being wiped clean every night. Honestly, just go watch the movie, her condition is so complex, and I am 99% sure fictional. However, Henry doesn’t have memory loss, and therefore grows to deeply love Lucy to the point he makes her a video (that’s how old this movie is) of their relationship so that every morning when she forgets his existence entirely, she can watch it and see the updated version of her life. He leaves the video for her to see right when she wakes up, and writes “good morning, Lucy!” in the hopes that she will play it immediately. You know what…I will make this topic an entire other blog later.
Fast forward a bit because I need to speed this thing up. It is our sixth day in Ireland, and in this story, we have not yet arrived.
The plane landed, and despite glasses of free red wine at high altitude, some of which I spilled on myself due to intense turbulence, I barely slept. Thus, as you can surmise, I landed in the BEST mood imaginable (sarcasm; hard to do in written form) and booked it to customs (while Zack stopped to pick up a girly pink umbrella), which was thankfully, completely void of people. We breezed though, and Zack earned his first foreign passport stamp from Ireland. We rushed out with our backpacks and bought our bus tickets to Galway, another long leg of our journey. Not expecting rain, cows, sheep and horses along the road for those Irish bus trips means you’ve likely not been on one. While I tried desperately to get out of my funk and the one-track-minded idea of dropping our stuff at the first BNB, The Four Seasons (do those even exist in Ireland?) I seriously couldn’t. Thankfully, my husband is good at getting me out of those funks.
We invented a character named Ol’ Nan, who would somehow always find herself atop cliffs and falls off and as she fell would say in her “old Irish grandmother voice” “oh noooooooo” and then explode at the end. Nan’s character gets further formed the longer we were on our trip. More on that to come.
During our honeymoon, it scarcely rained. In my previous trips to Ireland, it rained every moment of every day. In those experiences, I wondered how people kept any part of their clothing dry. There is usually wind as well; I’ve lost many a good umbrella to the wind blowing them inside out. Let’s take a moment of silence for the fallen soldiers (please continue reading once you have taken your moment of silence. I’ll wait.).
What felt like eight lifetimes later, we arrived at the Galway Coach Station and de-bussed (why is “deplane” a verb, but not “debus”?), then began the walk to our first BNB. Of course, the rain began pouring most aggressively right when I felt easiest to aggravate, so when I started questioning if we were going to right way, I was ready to explode (like ol’ Nan). We returned to the station to ask for directions, and it turned out we were going the right way, but it was farther up the road than I thought. With this new, irritating information, we continued the long, rainy walk to the Four Seasons Air BNB, our shoes and socks drenched despite the best efforts of our umbrellas. Upon checking in, we discovered that the second “B” would be an additional charge, which ended up being the case for many throughout the trip.
Sidebar time. Why even say BNB, fully aware that EVERYONE considers the second B of breakfast to be included in your booking? If you go to a hotel you don’t really expect the second B unless you specified you wanted breakfast included. If you go to a hostel and the B is included, it is crazy luck, or a banana and some instant coffee (which at a hostel is still luxury).
Okay so we got our antique-style room key, unlocked the door to room 4, dumped our stuff on the floor, and looked around. This was my first time in Ireland that I didn’t do “the hostel thing” the entire trip, so this small ensuite room with two twin beds and one queen or double, I am not sure, with a TV may as well have been Buckingham Palace. We debated what to do for a bit, for example whether or not to nap or try to quash jet lag from the get go. We lay down for a bit and turned on the TV for a bit. The channel on which we landed was for a children’s show in Gaelic, which we decided is a bizarre sounding language trying to shroud swear words and words like “Hitler” or “white supremacy.” That quickly became an inside joke. Of course, Gaelic is not a white-supremacist language. It won’t let me upload the video/s we took because I don’t to pay for blog extras, but here is one creepy example:
/https://youtu.be/uM8iMNinYdc?si=hZZh0yFuqwLR_34V
Then something caught my eye. THE SUN! When in Ireland, especially for short time periods, you RUN from wherever you are inside to go be in it and take pictures so you can pretend it is green at all times. So we went outside. We explored.
