First day of our holiday in Ireland

Prologue

The flight to Ireland went really well. We flew American Airlines to Chicago, took the train from terminal 3 to 5, and checked in with two hours to spare. I was all prepared with puzzles, a DVD player, coloring books, books and toy bags for the little girls. We ate and did some coloring and reading before getting on Aer Lingus flight to Dublin at 7pm. The kids, being seasoned travelers did really well. The flight was 7 hours, which was broken up into dinner, 2 movies and then sleeping time. Matthew and I were the only ones who didn’t sleep, Matthew played some games on the inflight entertainment screen and I listened to my iPod until it ran out of juice. Everyone else got 2-3 hours sleep.

Everything was very smooth until we got to passport control in Dublin. There were 3 workers for about 2000 people who arrived on the 3-4 international flights that landed at the same time. It took an hour to get through passport control. It was 3am our time but the kids were still happy, buoyed by the idea of seeing granny, who I am sure was wondering where we were!

It was lovely to finally get through passport control, get our bags and see granny. We picked up our hire car and made it home by 11am Irish time, 5am central US time.



Chapter one

The first thing that always strikes me when I get to Mum’s house is the color! Everything is so lush, green and the flowers bright. My Mum has a lovely back garden. Lily loves flowers so much I am afraid she will want to live in Ireland one day just to have a pretty garden! Somewhere in the day we all slept a bit and ate, it seems a bit of a blur now.



Chapter two

The next day (Thursday…today?!?) we waded deep into jet lag territory. The kids were wide awake at 3:30 am Dublin time, granny needed to sleep so we went down to Wicklow for a walk. We hiked up Rocky Valley. The sun was coming up – days are short here in summer, the sun goes down at 11pm and comes back up at 4am. It was lovely to be up to see the dawn move in so slowly.

For the rest of the day we all slept at various times, the little girls almost until dinner. I think it will take a while to adjust to the time difference. Mark worked (his work day starts at 2pm here), Matthew and I went to a book store, their cousin came over to play, we went to Dun Laoghaire for ice cream, when the big kids went asleep we took the little ones to the beach (at 10pm – hopefully they will sleep all night tonight). All in all we are blessed to be here and enjoying the lovely cool Irish summer.

I will be posting photos of our trip here, so check back in for more.