I have no idea how many posts this will be, how much I will share, or how long it will take me to share. I took roughly 1,000 pictures and recorded ~90 videos during my two week trip to Ireland. I haven’t watched most of the videos and managed to narrow the pictures down to more than 400. Still, too much to share. I’ll figure it out along the way. 🙂
Last pictures before leaving:
The view as we approached JFK. The plane window was very dirty but that’s Manhattan in the middle of the picture. I had just been there with the family about 3 weeks earlier.
Sunrise somewhere over the Atlantic…
It was raining when we arrived.
Baggage claim
The Shannon Airport was pretty small but it made it very easy to navigate (which I appreciated in my extremely sleep deprived and completely overwhelmed state. 🙂 )
My rental car that I dubbed “The Beast”. Giant American vehicles don’t fit so well on Irish roads or in Irish “car parks”.
The vehicle and the steering wheel on the right/wrong side of the car proved to be more of a challenge than driving on the left/wrong side of the road. It was hard to get used to such a large, unfamiliar car and the mirrors were never where I expected to see them.
Since I got to the hotel about 4 hours before check in, my room was not ready. It was cold and rainy out and nothing was open so early on a Sunday morning so I sat in the lobby for a while. I had a terrible time trying to stay awake (red eye flights are the work of the devil) so I went to the hotel’s underground car park and napped in the back seat of my car.
A couple of hours later, I tried the front desk again and they had my room ready. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to get into a hotel room. LOL
The view from my room/hotel:
That is the River Shannon. 🙂
I made some phone calls and Facetime’d with people back home then took a nice long nap. I woke up feeling much more refreshed. After a relaxing bath, I went out to wander around Limerick.
We went to get pumpkins after I got back from Ireland. We had a great day at the farm.
This year is the first year that both boys have attended the same school and started on the same day. It was nice being able to do all the first day festivities at once although the timing is always terrible for me work-wise (during August month end close).
Ian was first to go to school with his bus estimated to arrive at 7:45AM.
Needless to say, we were all thrown off when his bus arrived 10 minutes early. In fact, it came so early we didn’t have a chance to talk to him about what he was ordering for lunch or refresh his memory one more time about his classroom number or his teacher’s name. AND, we didn’t have the video camera out so we didn’t get that on video.
This is Matthew’s last year of Pre-K. He’s attending UPK at Ian’s school and will have the same teacher that Ian did. There are actually 5-6 kids in Matthew’s class that are the younger siblings of kids in Ian’s class. It’s like UPK 2.0. Lots of family faces this time around. 🙂
Enthusiastic about pictures, as always.
I actually love this one.
Matthew’s very lucky this year. His class comes built in with two pretty good friends: Jon-Jon (the younger sibling of Ian’s BFF Megan) and Ryan (a little boy that attended Pre-K with Matthew last year).
Love.
Getting his name tag:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMUiVd4Hrhg
Time to walk to the classroom!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1swdhtQXjU
Mike and I came home in the afternoon to see Ian off the bus. 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47rljjGyfw
So far school is going really well. The boys are doing awesome!
The last full day of our trip was to be spent on a beach along the Jersey shore but the day had a lot of hiccups.
Everyone woke up completely cranky because we were all over-tired. Mike locked the keys in the car while packing it up. Matthew got sand in his eye at the beach and was hysterical while leaving (and making a colossal scene). I stepped on a nail when leaving the beach that went through my flip flop and punctured my skin. Our hotel by the beach was TINY, a little dingy, and we had about half the number of towels that we needed.
Thankfully we had a really nice time at the beach. I just wish the rest of the day hadn’t turned out to be such a nightmare. Things actually went so badly that I had to cancel plans to go to a boardwalk amusement park with a friend vacationing in NJ. The boys (and their parents) just weren’t up to it.
Our spot at the beach.
We actually had to pay to go to the beach (Seven Presidents Oceanfront Park in Long Branch, NJ) which is something I’ve never seen before. Because we were going on a weekday (Friday), we only had to pay for Mike and me and then we also had to pay to park. I think it was $21 in total. The nice part was that there was a club house right at the beach with concessions, a bathroom, outdoor showers, etc. It was nice to have those conveniences.
The beach got insanely packed. I’ve never seen anything like it. I never felt like anyone was sitting right on top of me but there were people everywhere! This wasn’t too bad – it got significantly more busy after this.
The water was pretty rough and the current was really strong so it was really difficult for us to handle the boys in the water.
Mike got “talked to” about not going out too deep into the water while we were there. We just couldn’t win on this trip!
After baths/showers, naps, and a big dinner, we got a restful night of sleep and headed home in the morning. It was a loooong but (thankfully) uneventful drive home.
All-in-all, it was an awesome trip. 🙂