The Beginning

I left the house at 6:00am on the morning of the 29th with my Grandma Jan, Grandpa Don, and my Dad. Mom stayed home because she was really sick, and even though she told me not to I snuck in a little hug goodbye. I'm proud of Mom for keeping together so well with all of this. I half expected her to weep openly when the time came for me to go, but she was calm and collected the whole way through.

The first snag in the journey hit when at LAX I pulled out the printed reciept for my ticket and realized that the departure time was not actually 10:25am but 11:35am. Apparently I had been watching another flight really closely before I finally settled on this one and got the two confused, but they both had the same ending time in Dublin, 9:30am. However, this wasn't the worst mistake I could have made. It just meant that I'd have to sit in the terminal an extra hour. What's one more hour?

After saying goodbye to my father and grandparents I got through security, found the terminal, and caught my flight with amazing ease, and 5 hours later I was in Atlanta Georgia. The terminal to my next flight was 4,000 feet away according to the signs in the airport. Luckily, Atlanta's airport comes with a special subway that takes you to the other terminals, but I figured I've got two hours to kill and I should get used to walking with my backpack, so I decided to walk there. I totally misjudged how far 4,000 feet is...but I made it there with about 40 minutes to spare, and so I read the letters Amy and my Mom wrote for me to open on the plane (and got all teary-eyed).

In no time at all I was boarded onto my next and last leg of my adventure to Dublin, and I got seated next to an Irishman coming home from a skiing trip in Colorado. Tim, who was from Limerick (about two hours south of Dublin), and I talked and eventually got to be friends. We talked about my trip and he thought I was nuts, but said it was cool that I had the guts to do something like that alone. He told me what he thought were the best cities to visit in Europe that he'd been to, and how to keep safe and inconspicuous. However, as we talked we began to notice the raising of people's voices in the plane a couple rows back. Apparently some guy from Northern Ireland (a "Paddie" as he called him) was caught smoking in the bathroom. The flight attendant told him to put it out, and he refused. The guy was obviously drunk, and as the argument contunued he took a swing at the flight attendant, missed and immediately was tackled by several others of the airline staff. At this point we were about halfway over the atlantic and after they bound him up in the back, the captain announced that we had to turn the plane around and go back to the U.S. to do an emergency landing and remove the unruly passenger. So we flipped a U-turn and headed back 3 hours in the opposite direction to emergency land in Maine. When we got there, law enforcement had shut down the runway for us, and 3 SWAT teams were waiting on the runway. They boarded the plane and forcably removed the guy kicking and screaming, and then took the next two and a half hours interviewing witnesses and de-icing the plane. After all that, we started the halfway over 6 hour flight all over again.

I finally arrived in Dublin International at 1:00pm today. Weary and aching, and almost without even thinking at all, I passed through customs, exchanged $100 into Euros and caught a bus to City Center. I had no Idea where to find a place to stay, but Tim told me that there were a bunch of decent hostels in City Center so I thought I'd just wander around and see if I could find one. Just to make sure, I asked a lady next to me if this bus was indeed going to City Center, and she and another sweet lady told me exactly where I wanted to go and made sure I got off at the right stop. With little trouble I found a hostel and reserved a bed for the night.

They gave me sheets and a pillow, and I went upstairs (my room is the last one at the very top of the stairs, go figure) and put together my bed, where I then met one of my roommates, Alan. Alan's from Estonia and has been living in the hostel for the past 4 days. He showed me around a bit and then we both went out and explored around Dublin, and on the way back we went grocery shopping. Most of the people here in the hostel are around my age and from all over the place. When I tell them where I'm from they can't understand why I would leave the U.S. to travel around here in Europe. So far however I've been having fun, and it's certainly been an adventure.