Day 1

The plane first touches down at Shannon airport at around 6 AM local time for an hour's stopover before going on to Dublin. After five hours of dry, hot, recycled air, the moist atmosphere of the jetway is quite refreshing. Is it just me, or does Aer Lingus sound vaguely obscene?

As soon as we land at Dublin, we know we're in Ireland. As the plane taxis to the gate, we see deep green grass beyond the airstrip and sheep grazing. We get the car and, with little or no time for me to get my left-side-driving reflexes back, we're heading south on the M1 and heading for Dublin. This is not, on the whole, a good thing. There's construction going on, so traffic is heavy and I'm not entirely comfortable driving here. It only gets worse as we get into the city center. Dublin, being an old city, has narrow, twisty streets. It also has a profusion of one way, no left turn, and no right turn signs but otherwise poorly marked streets. Add into that the fact that we're not quite sure where we are or where we're going and you've got a very uncomfortable situation. However, after driving around for a while to get our bearings, we finally check into the Jury's Inn on Custom House Quay (actually a several-block-long section of a long street on the north bank of the Liffey). Neither of us can sleep on planes, so between getting up early in St. Marys, driving to Pittsburgh, flying to Boston, waiting for the Aer Lingus flight to take off, and actually flying to Ireland, we've been up in excess of 24 hours. However, we can't go to bed yet. If we did, we'd never get our internal clocks reset. So, then, we're forced to keep ourselves awake for several more hours. After indifferent Japanese food for lunch and some reasonably good smoked salmon for me and pasta for Stephanie for dinner, we're finally off to much-needed bed.