First Day in Ireland

Hello all!  We made it to the Emerald Isle and, after a whirlwind half-week, are settled in---mostly.

We arrived at the Dublin airport just before 9AM local time.  We slept little on the plane but were filled with eager, emotional, excited, hopeful, desperate, and nervous energy.  We had six large suitcases (some ours, some from Goodwill, one collected from the curb on Mayor's Clean-up Day) and two carry-on bags each.  We got lots of funny looks from everyone we met.  The baggage handlers and check-in desk employees in Des Moines wondered aloud why we had so much, and why we would pay for all the extra baggage fees.  The Dublin airport security and taxi attendants made comments, and our cab driver (when we finally got a van-style cab) gave us a friendly, "Ya sher don' travel light, do ya?"

All of this came with us after careful packing

Frog enjoying the Wimbledon Gentleman's
Final before we left our hotel for the airport

That was our plane, part of the Aer Lingus fleet

Our cab driver was very proud of his city and his country.  He was more than happy to point out things we should make sure to see before we leave.  "Don't worry," we said, "We'll have plenty of time to see everything in town."  Our taxi took us to our host's home with all of our bags in tow.  Our host generously let us stay in his home until we found a place to live, so it was nice to have a landing spot from which to launch our home search.

This is the first picture we took in Ireland, me picking up a
Euro 2-cent coin.  Awesome!

That afternoon, we set out to get some cheap food, a little Euro cash, and a pay-as-you-go cell phone.  The big UK/Ireland grocery store chain, Tesco offers low-cost phones with no proof-of-address needed.  We got something to eat and a phone, headed back to attempt staying up as late as we could to work off jet lag.

We had originally agreed to stay up until at least 8PM local time.  It was proving difficult for us as neither of us had slept in almost two days and we didn't have any more errands to run.  We watched Netflix as late as we could, but neither of us actually made it to 8PM.  With the sun still high in the sky, we zonked out.