Notes

 Jet Blue was fantastic.  The food was good and so were our seats.  I would fly them all the time if we could. 

Scotland.  Wow, the beauty, the food, the cleanliness.  The butter!  I felt a calm in Scotland. The people are not in a hurry.  They start work and school later and get off earlier.  They seem to work to live not the other way around.  We really could have used more time here in so many places and less in others.  The driving for Kirk was a lot.  Driving on the other side and their small roads was challenging.  He did great and I’m sure I would not have.  I would spend more time on Isle of Skye and Inverness, Glencoe and less in Edinburgh.  I loved Edinburgh but we spent the first day exploring the city when we landed, and did quite a lot, and then came back to 2 more days at the end and we did not need that many.  Kirk would disagree.  I think he felt our Edinburgh was a good amount.

Ireland was just lovely.  The landscape divided by old walls.  The ring of Kerry.  The cows and sheep living in serenity!  The bread.  Galway was a place I did not research before hand and I thought it would be a small city but it was quite large and lively!  Very young and fun.  I didn’t feel as safe there as other places.  The guys walked me home after dinner and went out to drink some more.  I didn’t feel like they had to do that at any other place.  It felt like a young persons town but we didn’t get to explore as much there as I would have liked.  Dublin was a perfect bend of a city - large with a lot to do, charged with energy and youth as well as history.  I felt safe here as well.  So many pubs and restaurants.  Not as clean as Scotland cities but still more so than here.  It was harder to understand some of the dialects in the countryside but seemed less in the city.  

We ate in so many pubs and the food was delicious - in both countries!  Ed commented that there wasn’t much variety - a lot of fish - but we loved it. We had so many AMAZING chowders and fish and chips but I never felt like I had too many!  I would say only one meal, we had at a pub, was not as good, in all 16 days.  

The calm of being away from all the political shit happening was wonderful.  Our algorithms changed on social media and we were also off it for so much of the time.  I also felt less consumerism.  We don’t typically buy stuff on vacation anymore, no gifts or souvenirs, but also being away from that part of social media was quite freeing.  There were so few “Kardashians”, fake lashes and over done lips etc.  And it felt the only overweight people were Americans.  Didn’t see much snacking at all - no chips, candy etc.  Probably helped with the lack of litter.  They are leaps ahead of us in contactless paying.  Every single place had a hand held payment.  And people are nicer drivers.  It took a lot to get the LA out of Kirk when he was driving.  He only said once that “he was going to stop and beat the buy behind us up”.  :)

I didn’t like the constant moving and because we had different clothes for different things (hiking, rain, city exploring and dinners) we just had heavy luggage, even though it was all carryon.  Kirk said he did well with his clothes but I was not as happy with mine funnily b/c the weather was so good! I didn’t need my waterproof shoes or boots, or quick dry pants.  I ended up buying some asics to walk around town in b/c my hikers were too stiff, although perfect for hiking the Isle of Skye and wet streets.