Fly Away

I purchased our roundtrip tickets to Ireland today!!  I'm all bouncy now.  Choosing seats on the plane,  the agent printing out our itinerary, finding out about carry-on restrictions (1 40 pound bag that can fit into overhead, separate laptop bag is fine) and all that made our trip feel much more real.  We paid a very pretty penny for it, but it's still relatively inexpensive compared to the rest of Europe.  Tomorrow I'll go back with a list of the hotels we want to stay at as well as setting up the arrangements for the bed and breakfast stuff.  The hotels we can either book normally online or through the agency, but the bed and breakfast thing is technically a 'request' through a third party that negotiates with folks in Ireland.  They can say no, but they'll offer an alternative that costs about the same--they don't turn people away from doing touristy stuff.  It's a new thing for me, so I'm a little nervous, but nervous in a good way.  I'm very curious about how it'll be to stay at those places and how easy it'll be to find them.

Every place we're staying offers a complementary breakfast.  The rest of the meals we're on our own.  

I am really looking forward to this on so many levels that it's hard to resist making a long row of exclamation points.

Oh, what the heck.  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even though it's way early, I'll be making sure our passports are all in order and I'll start making lists of what we'll bring.  This is one trip that we won't be bringing any extraneous bs.  Everything will be compact, practical and durable.  There are tons of suggested packing lists online and I plan to go over them closely.  The emphasis lately has been bare necessities and packing light.  Lots more people are traveling with only carry-on.  I don't know if we'll pull that off but we'll definitely try.  If we can't quite manage to travel that light, I'll aim for one checked bag between the three of us.  I hear that everything there will be smaller than we're used to, including the cars, so I want to make sure that we don't have to sit on our luggage when we tour around.

Yay Ireland!