So I know that's a bit of a weird title for a post--the day zero part, but gotta start somewhere. I know I have other stuff to blog about, but I figured since I was on a roll with posting for a week there that I would just do Ireland now too. I can post on other aspects of life later. And of course me being me, "later" could be two days or it could be six months from now. So here we go...
I was heading to Ireland for a month to take a graduate course. After the course ended, I was planning to do a little sightseeing and visit some friends in the UK. The afternoon of my flight, my husband kindly drove me to the airport, and despite leaving early we still hit a bit of traffic. The gps rerouted us midway and we thought, do we trust it or not? My husband who has a wonderful sense of direction (unlike me!) decided to listen to it, though we found it strange that it told us to get off the highway. But it worked! The gps sent us through the city so we avoided some of the highway traffic that was stopped and got us safely to the airport--well, I guess I should give my husband some credit for getting safely to the airport lol. Anyway, got there, hugged and kissed hubby good-bye and then it was off to check in. Line wasn't bad there--I think I waited all of five minutes. Then to security, which was also a fairly short line. I was a little nervous because I have NEVER flown with a laptop, but the TSA people were pretty nice, they just said to take it out of the bag and put it in its own bin. Did that. Went through the scanner and a few minutes later my carry on, my sneakers, sweatshirt, watch, Fitbig, laptop, and ziploc bag of toiletries came back, but NO purse. I kept looking down the belt for it and finally spotted it off the belt in front of a TSA person. So always one to worry, I'm sitting there thinking, Okay what did I do wrong? Did I forget to pull out a liquid? Was it because my cell phone was on? Was it my laptop cord? I left the cord in the bag and just pulled out the laptop. Well, the TSA lady told me she needed to search my bag and she'd do it in a minute when there was a free spot. Two other people's bags were being searched. She was nice about it though. So she started searching in a few minutes while I was getting my shoes and Fitbit back on. After a few minutes, she said it was my chocolate covered almonds that set it off. I'm not sure if it was the shape, the smell, or what. She told me it was no problem and she nicely packed everything back in my bag including the almonds. I told her that's what I got for having a sweet tooth and she laughed. The ironic part is, I almost didn't bring them. It was a last minute grab as we were leaving the house so I'd have some snack food. At dinner, I later found out someone else in my program got pulled over for his game of Bananagrams. So I told him we need to play Bananagrams while eating dark chocolate covered almonds.
Anyway, with everything back in place, I headed to the gate then checked Facebook and found out some people from my group were heading to a restaurant kind of near our gate for dinner. They were all lovely, but trying to find people was a little strange. People kept posting on Facebook, I'm at this place, I'm wearing such and such. I think perhaps because I looked lost someone from the course asked me if I was headed to Ireland for the course and I said yes. I'm shy around new people so I was glad to be "found." She had met someone else and soon a few more people joined us. What did we do in the days before Facebook? The service at dinner was a little slow so by the time we finished it was nearly time to start boarding the plane, but it was nice to meet people and get to know them a little bit. We soon boarded the plane and were ready to go a little while before take off, but due to the wind (or something weather related) we were late leaving so we sat on the runway for a bit and I think we may have even had to change runways. Eventually we were off. The flight wasn't bad--a bumpy landing and a little turbulence along the way, but nothing major. I shouldn't complain because I later found out that one girl in my group had to sit on the run way for 5 hours! So that ends day 0 and brings us to Day 1 when we arrived in Galway, but you'll have to wait for the next post for that. :-) Cheers!
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