Ireland, Day One: Business Class to Bunratty

Ireland has been on our list of places to go essentially since we started making lists of places to go, but it seemed intimidating. In Scotland we only drove in the Highlands for 5 days, and I knew we'd want more time than that in Ireland. And it requires so much pre-planning - how do you choose a route, and should we prebook all the places to stay beforehand? Plus the terror of driving on the left of tiny roads and all that. But when we were talking about where to take the next big trip, Ben said, "Let's do it. Let's go to Ireland," and I said OKAY.

The day we both got word from our bosses that the vacation was approved, we also found out Ben got a completely unexpected 5% bonus. I joked to him that flying business class was only a few hundred bucks more each and he said, "Let's do it," and I said OKAY. No, really, I said, "Are you serious?" but as it turns out, he was serious. So I did. And honestly, it was amazing. It wouldn't have been been worth paying what I'm accustomed to paying for an international business class fare for my boss, who routinely does stuff like, say, fly to India for the day, but for a one-time thing of a few hundred bucks that's coming out of an unexpected bonus? Yes.

Firstly, I should say that when I first saw our plane in Boston I cried a little bit. I went over to take this picture and there was another lady also excitedly taking a picture and we made eye contact and shared a nerd smile moment. There have been a few times since cancer when I really, viscerally appreciate being right here and still being alive, and this was one of them. (Others: catching a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower for the first time, being at Hillary's house with the family on Mira & Harrison's birthday, watching Jerry Seinfeld do stand-up at Radio City Music Hall.)

Business class was a constant parade of delights. AWW YEAH HERE WE ARE. Ben was possibly not as excited as I was.

You get a toiletry kit! With the world's smallest toothpaste!

A fancy menu with entree choices and wine selections!

Champagne or orange juice before you even take off! Champagne gives me an instant headache and I knew we were going to be awake for like 24 hours after this point so I stuck with OJ. This was the last time my hair was straight for two weeks, by the way. Ireland is very wet and the ends of my hair are still very stubbornly curly.

So much leg room! My shoes didn't even reach the other side!

Look at all those things you can do to your seat! Including full flat-bed recline. We actually got to sleep for a couple of hours stretched out like a normal person, with a real blanket and pillow. Amazing.

APPETIZERS.

There was also this secret bottle of water in our seats.

My dinner was steak and it was actually good.

Ben got the chicken.

Honestly.

Then we got dessert, warm chocolate lava cake. At this point I was brainstorming ways to get super rich so we can do this all the time.

Business class is great, man. Offensively great, given how the other 95% of passengers on the plane are treated.

Sadly, once we arrived in Ireland we became normal people again when we picked up the cheapest, most unbelievably basic car you can possibly imagine. It was a Seat Mii. It didn't even have power windows. You have to ROLL UP THE WINDOWS like it's 1987.

Here we go! Getting in the drivers seat!

Reminder.

We flew into Shannon because it's a small town, close to all the places we wanted to go, and much much easier to get into and drive out of than Dublin. We stayed in Bunratty, 5 miles away, for the same reason - it's close to the airport. Hopefully a not so harrowing drive at 6:15am on no sleep on the left hand side of the road.

It was harrowing. Ben said he wasn't freaked out but I sure was, probably because I'm the one who has absolutely no control over anything that's happening, sitting in the passenger seat. Those freaking roundabouts! And WHY do they drive on the left. Come on, British Isles, get it together.

Anyway, we did make it safe & sound to the Bunratty Manor Hotel, where they served us our first full Irish breakfast, which we learned is essentially meat, plus an egg and half a tomato.

By the time we finished breakfast at 8:15, our room was ready, which was a blessing as we were already beginning to feel insane with fatigue. It was a nice little hotel, older and family owned.

We had a nice view of the back gardens.

Here is the front of the hotel with our terrible car parked in front of it. For about three hours we couldn't figure out how to lock the back doors. We did a lot of brainstorming, saying out loud to each other many times, "SURELY there is a way to lock the back doors of the car." No power locks or keyless entry, obviously. Google was no help, presumably because no one actually buys this car on purpose and therefore has no need to ask questions about it. Finally we deduced you have to press in on the door handles themselves until a little sliver of red shows. Oh right, obviously.

The only major thing to do in Bunratty is go to the Bunratty Castle & Folk Park. Rick Steves is not big on this attraction, I have to tell you. But as we considered this a lost day anyway, and our main goal was only to stay awake until nighttime, we headed over. The lady at the hotel told us to get there right when it opened to avoid the tour buses, so we did.

It had goats. We really like goats a lot.

The castle was completely deserted. The hotel lady was right on with her recommendation, as when we were leaving there was a big gaggle of people who had obviously come straight off a bus.

It was a pretty standard castle. Big thick walls, tiny windows, grand halls, etc.

They were still getting ready for the day!

It had quite a lot of my least favorite tourist thing, very steep stone spiral staircases.

The views of the River Shannon at the top were beautiful. Ireland really does look just like the pictures.

Tired.

The Folk Park part is a bunch of old (and re-created) buildings depicting what Irish life was like for people of various incomes.

It definitely had a manufactured Disney-like feel and I can understand why Rick doesn't think it's worth your time, but if your only interest is in filling a day until you can go to sleep, I recommend the Bunratty Folk Park. It's big and there's a lot of wandering you can do.

And it was really beautiful, in a quiet setting with gorgeous gardens.

There is also a fake village.

After this we couldn't stand it and we did go back and sleep for a while, then got up for dinner at a pub across the street, and then we went back to sleep again for 15 hours. Bliss.

DCI World Championships

I found out about the existence of Drum Corps International when I was drum major of my high school marching band. The championships are usually televised (although not live), and since I discovered this around 10 years ago and started watching, I've always sort of wanted to go. They work so hard! It looks fun! Then I got cancer, which caused me to more intentionally start doing things I've always sort of wanted to do. My mom mentioned it in early February this year and I looked into it and tickets were already almost sold out! Hotels, too. We bought tickets and booked the whole thing immediately and then had to wait many months for it to be time to go to Indianapolis.

One of the cancer friends I made on breastcancer.org lives in Indianapolis, so when I got there we met up for beers & snacks. She is GREAT. It's such an amazing thing, how going through this binds you with strangers in such a deep and immediate way.

Then I walked over to the Hilton to meet up with my family.

We brought Mira along, for her first ever girls' weekend. She was a good sport about being drug around a random US city to attend an event she didn't care about! It was raining, but we ran through the rain to a pizza place down the block for dinner.

On Saturday we got up for some Indianapolis sightseeing. Downtown Indianapolis is pretty!

This is the Soldiers & Sailors Monument. You can take an elevator to the top.

OR, you can save your $2 and take the stairs. It's 33 flights. How bad could it be?

It was super rough, and hot at the top. But we all made it and the views were great!

This picture kills me because everyone is so smiley. In reality we were sweaty and exhausted.

After we walked back down the 33 flights of stairs we sat down for a little break. My legs hurt for three days after this.

We went over to the war museum, which was in a very nice building, and wandered around there for an hour or so. We watched an extremely lengthy video on the Indian wars of the 1700s in which I realized for the first time in my 40 years of life that INDIANA comes from INDIAN.

Then we went to The Eagle for lunch. It's a fried chicken place and was terrific. We got a bunch of different carby sides to split and Mira even ate a tiny bite of corn bread.

We found out Indianapolis has a little canal through downtown like San Antonio.

Hillary successfully propped her iPhone up on her purse to get a group shot!

Finally IT WAS TIME. The tickets said the event started at 4:55, so we walked to the stadium to discover the first corps wasn't actually until 6:30. They started with a bunch of awards presentations and performances by other bands, including the U.S. Marine Drum & Bugle Corps.

Then we got to see four hours of marching bands. The ones at the beginning had scored the lowest in preliminaries, and tended to be flashier with more focus on color guard and props than actually playing and performing music. One of them had a weirdly overt Christian theme with people reading Bible verses and a shirtless Jesus running around.

The last three - the top three from the preliminaries - were amazing, way above the rest of the pack. The crowd was really hilarious to watch, too. People take this extremely seriously.

In the end, all the corps come back onto the field for the awards ceremony and have to stand at attention while everyone files in. It took a long time, man. It was 11:00pm and we were tired.

In the end, the Blue Devils - the Yankees/Patriots of Drum Corps International - won. We were hoping for a little excitement with an upset because the second place corps (Santa Clara Vanguard) was also incredible, but alas.

The next morning I was on a 7:30 flight and was home back in my pajamas by 10:00am! It was a great way to spend the weekend and to initiate Mira into our girls' trips.

Whirlwind Weekend in KC

In June I had an action-packed weekend of kid-related activity in Kansas City. I was supposed to go in May, but a work meeting and cancelled flights out of New York ruined the whole plan, so I had to reschedule. It turned out to be for the best, anyway, because I ended up really sick on the original weekend and would have not been a very fun Aunt Molly. 

Griffin was out of town with his dad, but I got to see Sully & Mira play baseball and Harrison wander around being mischievous.

Sully only had one game. He got an RBI hit! He is still very small.

He told me he would throw my phone in the toilet if I didn't delete this picture. Joke's on you, Sulls!

Mira was playing in a tournament. I think I saw her play five games? Maybe six. I also went to her dance recital and took her to see Wonder Woman. She's always looked just like her mom, but it's getting pretty uncanny now that she's so tall; out of the corner of my eye I thought she was Hillary a few times.

Harry is the Banana of the Smith kids. He is so bad but so cute and is completely aware he can do whatever he wants and get away with it.

Mom and I managed to cram in a bit of the Sunday afternoon Royals game between Mira's softball and dance recital. Hillary's season tickets are coincidentally right in front of my cousin's, so I got to see some family I haven't seen since my grandmother died.

However, it started raining almost instantly, so we had some nachos and then had to leave for the dance recital. All for the best - the rain delay ended up being a couple of hours.

It was a weekend of nonstop action that gave me a really interesting glimpse into suburban parenthood! I'm tired enough just getting all my library books read most of the time; this lifestyle would kill me.

Road Trip!

There is a famous restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina, about 90 minutes from Raleigh, called Chef and the Farmer. The chef, Vivian Howard, has a PBS show and a recent award-winning cookbook. I've been hearing about this place for years - it opened around the time we moved here - and finally looked into going. When I made the reservation in February, the first available Saturday night was Memorial Day weekend. Insanity! 

We decided to make a mini-trip out of it, and drove out to New Bern to see some North Carolina history things beforehand. New Bern was the first state capital and this building, the Tryon Palace (governor's mansion), is also featured in the fourth Outlander book. I spent a lot of time on the tour imagining Claire wandering around listlessly thinking about how she was going to get back to Jamie.

I accidentally left my phone in the car so we are reliant on Benjamin for documentation. He likes to really focus in on small details.

Historic New Bern was really interesting and definitely something we should have done sooner, given our propensity for touring old houses and buildings.

We headed back to Kinston and checked into an amazing boutique hotel down the block from the restaurant. When I originally booked the dinner, the hotel didn't have any availability, so we were going to stay at a Hampton Inn out on the highway. At the last second I checked again, and hooray! A room had opened up.

The O'Neil Hotel is in an old bank building, and they've retained a lot of the original infrastructure in the room design.

Our room had an original vault that had been turned into a small bunk bed room.

The lobby was great, too. Impeccably decorated and with another original vault.

Inside the vault is free coffee and beer! The hotel owners also own a microbrewery.

There was a little balcony lounge where we hung out for a bit.

Downtown Kinston is like the small towns where I grew up in Northwest Missouri. Like most rural areas, many storefronts were empty. However, Kinston has really undergone a revitalization that began with Chef & the Farmer. Vivian Howard has another restaurant there too, and I'm sure the boutique hotel wouldn't exist without the demand created by the restaurant.

The restaurant was very unpretentious.

And the food totally and completely lived up to the gype. We had the grits to start, then the asparagus and poached egg. I had the mahi as my entree and Ben got the pork. The greens that went along with his pork were incredible, and caused me to buy the cookbook immediately in hopes of finding out how she made them taste like that.

After eating all that food, we walked around downtown Kinston for a while, which was mostly deserted. There was a park with this weird art installation but no signage explaining what was going on.

All in all, it was a fun way to spend part of our holiday weekend! I would go back any time.

I drank wine at the beach!

Since leaving the wine distributor where I worked for eleven years, I've stayed in touch with my boss's daughter (who is my age) and we've become friends. I miss the wine industry! She invited me to come to the beach for the Beaufort Wine Festival this year, an event for which I made other people's hotel and dinner arrangements for over a decade but had never actually attended myself.

On the way there, driving by myself through rural Eastern North Carolina, my tire pressure light came on. Sighhhhh. I didn't really know what to do and debated ignoring it, but then saw KEVIN 'TIRE' on the side of the road so I stopped and asked a very nice man to check my tires. I'm no dummy, though; I took a picture in case I got murdered.

The tires were fine, fortunately; it was the first truly hot weekend of the year and I guess the heat makes a difference or something. Blah blah blah. I pressed on.

There are wine festival events all weekend, wine dinners & tastings, but the part I attended was sampling wines & snacks in a big tent outdoors. I saw lots of people I used to work with and drank a lot of rose. It was a great way to pass a Saturday afternoon.

After the event, we went to a house where many of my old company's employees and suppliers stay for the weekend. Let me be clear, "many" means like eight. But I guess they all brought wine. There was plenty.

This was the first time I'd really been involved in the social side of the wine business and it was a whole different situation than sitting in the office doing compliance paperwork, let me tell you. We went to a bar. A bar!! I don't even remember the last time I went to a bar.

The next morning I amazingly did not feel terrible. I stayed with my friend at my old boss's condo, which turned out to be understated but spotless and beautiful and perfectly situated, which is consistent with everything about the way he lives. I miss you, Mr. Kennedy!