Greetings everyone! My family has returned from our European trip and I thought I would share our adventures and misadventures with you. All in all, it was a most fantastic and marvelous experience, one which we hope to continue next year. As originally planned, my family made our way to Europe via Dover Delaware military hop to RAF Mildenhall England. We drove from the Atlanta area to Dover AFB, stayed on base and flew out the next afternoon on a cargo transport aircraft. The flight took about eight hours, arriving the next morning five hours ahead local time. We stayed on base at RAF Lakenheath, another base close by and rented a car with GPS which turned out to be rather fun and adventurous in itself. Rent car with GPS: check. Have car rental dude load GPS with base coordinates to ensure we get there with no issues because he is familiar with unit and it will only take him a minute to enter coordinates, but don’t watch him do it because we have a similar model at home with world maps installed but forgot to bring and just figured we could figure this one out: check. Admiring the countryside and sights on way to local pub for dinner which should have only taken say, five minutes to drive to, but ended up admiring the sights around Cambridge University because well, somehow the GPS took us to same named pub in Cambridge instead: check. Alas, it was after kitchen hours when we arrived and ate Asian instead as it was one of the only remaining eating establishments open past ten in the evening where we were. Who’d of thought a university town would close up so early? By the way, the park across from Cambridge University looks lovely at night while strolling past looking for your car and trying to remember where you parked. The next day we made it to the outer train station to take the train into London for the day, albeit later than we planned despite the GPS and our still not reading the provided booklet. After all, you can only get “so” lost on an island, right? In order to spare him, we ended up designating our 19 year old son the navigator in lieu of, well, if you have a know-it-all teenager, then you probably know what I mean. Anyway, he did a marvelous job of navigating us everywhere. After several days of sightseeing, my daughter and I decided not to go to Paris with my husband and son to meet up with my nephew who is there for a semester in college, opting to strike out and begin our adventures early. We planned instead to meet back up in Paris before heading back to the states. As it turned out, he was in Morocco that week and wouldn’t be back in Paris until later that weekend, so not wanting to burn days, we left for Ireland. (And yes, my husband and son were in Paris “that day”, having arrived earlier in the day but were safe in their room that evening). We took a bus from Mildenhall to Victoria Station in London, changed buses, taking the southern ferry route to Ireland. We continued on to Cork, then up to Dingle. Traveling by bus was nice and the scenery beautiful all along the way. The ferry ride was nice too. In the lounges, you can stretch out and sleep if you want, or as my daughter did, connect via Wi-Fi to pass the time, although she worked on school work. Looking back, the captain’s announcement apologizing for the rough seas we were heading into should have been an omen for what turned out to be a rather windy and damp adventure.
Our plans were to backpack around the Dingle peninsula, staying at hostels and B&B’s along the way, then move on to other parts hither and yon. By the nature of our trip and not having firm dates of arrival from which to make reservations, we had to wing it from our arrival in Dingle. Failure on my end not to confirm reservations made prior to leaving the states to stay at one of the pubs in town, they rightly rented to others. I only had tentative dates from which to work with and hoped being off season, they would have rooms available once there. Unfortunately not, but we ate there two nights nonetheless. The tourism information office was most helpful in providing us information on some of the hostels available. We ended up staying at one of the hostels for three days assessing our plan of action since the weather was more severe than we anticipated, when an error of judgement and haste resulted in computer damage with my daughters tablet specifically purchased for school work on this trip. We took a bus to the airport outside of Tralee and rented a car for two weeks. This allowed us freedom to drive wherever we needed to get her tablet fixed, or to an internet café for school work in the event our lodging didn’t have the internet access her coursework required, should her tablet remained crippled. As it turned out, her tablet hung in there and limped along for the duration of our trip. The car rental became our plan “B”, as the hurricane which remained parked over our area provided ample wind and continued to create a dangerous situation for us while carrying backpacks in the muddy slippery soil on hillsides. The rain and temperature were not an issue, the high winds blowing us down was. So, scrap the backpacking around the Dingle peninsula for another less windy visit and commence upon what turned out to be our “highway tourism” adventures in Ireland. We got her tablet checked out and headed back to Dingle for one last day/night of sightseeing and shopping, then struck out for Doolin, which would surely be less damp and windy, right? No. Any other time, just as I do at home, I would have looked online for weather reports. However, tablet madness preoccupied our thoughts and I simply didn’t think to check the weather out before we struck out for Doolin. Silly me. We hadn’t watched TV since we left England, much less caroused the internet. The drive to Doolin was lovely and the weather pleasant. By the way, cool idea to have small wind generators attached to sign posts to power the unit. We saw several of these along our drive to Doolin (missed that clue…). Remember my previous musing about just how lost could one get on an Island? Did I mention this rental also included a GPS? Well…more later.
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