Ireland

Devin Beliveau
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

After my first foreign journey to Switzerland, my group and I headed off on the final leg of our trip, Ireland. In my post about Switzerland I mentioned that I was disappointed at first that we weren’t spending more time in the bigger city of Geneva. But by the time I had a few days travel under my belt, I was now disappointed we were spending most of our time in Ireland in Dublin and not in the Irish countryside. All the details of this trip are a little hazy now as well, but I do remember a few key things. We were staying in a hostel with a traveling rugby team and at this point in my life I didn’t like beer.

We went out and about Dublin without any supervision and spent time as one does in a city, shopping and drinking. Since I didn’t drink beer and wasn’t (and am still not) a huge whiskey drinker, I decided to stay in spirits by drinking Baileys on the rocks pretty much the entire trip. I don’t remember much else of Dublin honestly. We went to Trinity College and the Guinness Factory, where I traded my free beer chip for a Coca-Cola (I know, I know) and I remember walking up and down and across the bridges of the River Liffey.

My favorite part of the trip was to Galway. Galway was the picturesque Ireland I was looking for. The greens were the greenest I’d ever seen and the air felt like it was strictly Irish. We found a wandering black lab and followed it around the coast for a while, taking pictures and listening to the ocean. We went up a hill and walked around an old graveyard. There were some girls with Irish heritage on the trip and I walked with them down the store-lined cobblestone streets while they searched for Claddagh rings. Galway reminded me of home in a way. A town on the ocean where the people looked liked they made their living off the land and sea around them.

I do remember at the end of my trip, my iPod Mini fell of the top bunk bed I was sleeping on and the screen cracked. Luckily it still worked well enough that I could listed to music on the plane ride home. We flew to back to the US on what can only be described as a puddle jumper out of Shannon.

I’ve had a lot of weird experiences on planes. I’ve been on multiple planes that have been hit by lightning and one that fishtailed on the runway. I’ve flown on a plane with duct tape wrapped around the wing and have seen the oxygen masks fall from above. I’ve been on a plane that went straight back into the air five feet before landing because there were too many planes on the runway and the pilot didn’t want to fill out paperwork. But this plane trip from Shannon has to be the weirdest thing that I’ve experienced on a plane, and it was all before takeoff.

The plane was barely tall enough for some to stand up straight in and we had to travel through a large storm over the Atlantic. We boarded and hour late and then proceeded to sit on the runway for another few hours. The pilot came on and told us that there was something wrong with our radar and our plane wouldn’t be able to be seen if we went more than one-hundred miles off any coastline. They had been working on an alternate route that brought us up and over the Arctic Circle, down through Greenland (where we would refuel) and Canada and finally into the US. The travel time was going to be seventeen and a half hours. We tried to wrap our heads around this while we waited some more until we were interrupted by the pilot who then told us everything was fine now and we could go on our regularly scheduled route. After hours and hours of delay, none of us really cared anymore and we didn’t really question it. We took off and after a lot of turbulence through the storm, landed home.

My second ever trans-Atlantic flight was a little weird, but it wasn’t weird enough to deter me from traveling again. I was already thinking about where I would get to travel to next.

The famous colored houses of Galway. 2005.
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I code. I travel.

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