This is Awesome...But You Stink

It has been a long day--or should I say days. We left one day, but then it's the next day, when it should actually be last night...or is it morning? What time is it? What day is it?

At the beginning, we woke up at 7:00am PST for our midday flight that took us to Chicago for our layover. On the way to LAX is when the sweating began. Our confirmation e-mail was saying one departure time, but our flight number was giving us another time. One would give us a 2+ hour layover. The other would give us barely a 1 hour layover. All while needing to go through security again, but for an international flight. Let the stress sweating commence.

Stress sweating: we were worried about our first departure time. Crisis averted with an early departure. Stress sweating: the line for international security is wrapped around the corner. Crisis soothed by "Japanese Canadian citizen man who lives in Augusta, Georgia

and travels all the time." Stress sweating again: our FindIt devices (that we put inside of our backpacks to locate them) don't pick up the signal that our luggage is on board. Crisis averted when we landed in Dublin and saw two huge bright blue bags coming around the carousel.

Not to mention the stress sweating at Dublin customs when we saw everybody except us had a little piece of paper out with their passport.

"Why does everybody have that? Do we need a little piece of paper," I ask out loud to myself, Preston, and anybody in the vicinity.

"It's your landing card," responds a woman as she swings her

backpack off one shoulder. "They gave them to us in Chicago. If you don't have them they'll yell at you." She hands us two extra landing cards. "Trust me, we learned the hard way last year."

Crisis averted!

Next step, contact the parents so that they know we are alive, and make sure social media accounts are updated via the airport wifi. This step relieves stress sweating for the family members.

At last, we walk out the doors into the cold, moist air. It almost smells and feels like a skating rink--in a good way. After the 12+ hours of dripping pits it's nice to finally be able to air them out.

Luckily, the transit from Dublin Airport to our AirBnB location was smooth, considering we had no idea if we were on the right bus. We picked a bus called the CityLink because we were

going into the city. Makes sense, right?

Thankfully, the public buses in Dublin all have free WiFi. Without cellular access (well, without paying $2.05 per megabyte), we were still able to follow ourselves on GoogleMaps to precisely the right stop, just one residential block away from our home for the next 4 days.

Preston and I were an hour early for our meet up time with James to get the keys to our place. We aired out our pits some more in the nearby park while dodging pidgeon, duck, and seagull bombs that were fully loaded from the three people that came in to feed them cornflakes and bread during our wait.

In the end, we finally got our keys and got a hot, yet very low pressure, shower to get that travel stank off of us.

It seems like this is the end of a very long day, but we decided

to make it even longer. Good idea to avoid lasting jet lag; bad idea to avoid jumping at each other throats after being awake 30 hours.

Let's just say, we attempted to go out to grab a bite to eat and check the nearby sights, but ended up bickering over everything. Bickering over being grumpy. Bickering over being tired. Bickering over Preston not taking pictures of me. Bickering over who gets to pay with their Euros (because it's fun to use foreign currency). Bickering over whether or not to get tea/coffee. [Advice: Coffee/tea is always a good idea when events go awry.]

In the end, we were both overly dramatic. Even though we both knew it was awesome to be in Ireland, we both stank with our attitudes.

I'm totally keeping all of the grumpy pictures we took so we can look back and laugh about how unreasonable we become when there is a lack of sleep or food.

Preston is "just closing his eyes" for the last twenty minutes as I write this. Tomorrow we will be better equipped to handle picking a restaurant, deciding what to do, and taking pictures [of each other].

But today....Hey! We are in freakin' Ireland!