We have it all planned...

Dia dhuit!

The best laid plans…. We’ve been working on this trip for months—fourteen reservations for lodging, car rental, international flights, apps to keep in touch with home, apps to track Ireland weather and call for rides, SIM card swapping instructions, packing lists, email contacts, setting up meetings, readingreadingreading all the research I could find, international travel insurance, registering with US Embassy, getting site and driving advice from an Irish-American friend who takes tours to Ireland, working out in excruciating detail an elaborate color-coded daily itinerary, now in version 7.2.

So, of course, the plane that was supposed to get us from Sioux Falls to Chicago was two hours late due to “mechanical issues.” We missed our connecting flight to Dublin and couldn’t get another flight until 10 p.m. last night. There goes my color-coded itinerary. Instead of finding Dublin laundry sites today, American Airlines put us up last night in a mediocre Chicago hotel, gave us a taxi voucher, and gave us each a $12 meal voucher, which was just enough to pay for the non-complimentary “average cheap hotel breakfast buffet” and bad coffee.

Since our re-booked flight didn’t leave until 10 p.m., we had yesterday in Chicago. We decided to spend it at the Art Institute of Chicago, where they’re having a traveling exhibit of Renoire portraits. I’m not much of an art critic, and I don’t know much about art, but looking up close at the brush strokes and thinking about what the artist was thinking about as s/he touched the canvas, made me very happy. And seeing the work of Renoire, Manet, Monet, Rodin, Wood, Hopper, Degas, and more, under one roof, was stunning. Oh yeah...there was an Asian art exhibit that featured a room full of Buddha sculptures from different periods. A room full of Buddhas.

We finally got into Dublin about 11:30 this morning, after an overnight flight. Because of city center traffic congestion and new light rail lines, the taxi driver couldn’t get us too close to Trinity College main entrance (interestingly, when I asked if he knew where the old laundry site was in a neighborhood we were driving through, he said no and clammed up for the rest of the ride).

When he dropped us off, we walked to the campus dragging our bags, then dragged them across campus over cobblestones for another 75 miles (1/4 mile, but dang, we were tired), then carryied them up a flight of stairs. Then, we walked downtown in search of a SIM card for my phone and a bite to eat. Did I mention that neither of us had slept more than an hour or two on the plane last night? Tonight is a “recovery” night. I’ll do some reconfiguring of the schedule, and probably be in bed snoring loud enough to wake the zombies, before dark.

Tomorrow, we’ll set off in search of the Magdalens.

Can I fit in the Heaney exhibit?

Shuffle your feet, lose your lunch.

Trinity College's steady stream of tours.