Eur-Exit
Alas, it had to end. 2018, Christmas and New Year’s, and our
long-anticipated trip to Ireland, to pick up our daughter who had spent a
college semester in Dublin.
I’m okay with 2018 ending. Watching the 100 new female members of Congress get sworn in yesterday already made 2019 better than all of 2018 combined. We’re probably all grown too cynical to think that anything is really going to get better quickly, but I’m looking for hopeful green shoots of grass wherever I can find them.
I’m okay with Christmas and New Year’s ending, too. Not spending them at home made the 2018 holidays seem a little weird anyway: no stockings were hung, no Christmas tree, no bottomless pitchers of Poinsettia champagne cocktails on December 25th. As for New Year’s Eve, we were in our pajamas at 6 pm. The only reason we made it until midnight was because we are, as a family, binge-watching and obsessed with La Casa de Papel which definitely does not translate from Spanish to English as Money Heist, despite what Netflix calls it.
(And yes of course this is only adding weight to my
husband’s belief that he is fluent in Spanish, thanks for asking.)
Which brings me to the thing to which I’m not so happy to bid farewell: our wonderful trip. We flew to Dublin on December 22, flew to London on December 28, and flew back to California on January 2 (on a plane that should have been nicknamed “Crying Baby Express.”) Even if ten days is about all I can stand to be away from my own bed, there were a lot of reasons I would repeat the entire trip in a flash (minus the crying babies.)
First, obviously, was the fact we hadn’t seen our daughter in
3D for four months (Skype has its limits.) We had left unresolved whether she
would meet us at the airport or not, so when she popped up at the Arrivals Gate
I let out a scream of delight that mortified 75% of my family. (I was the 25%
who felt it was a wholly appropriate reaction.) Her study abroad may not
have been the one any of us expected a year ago, but that’s only because it
turned out even better.
Second, this was our first trip to Ireland. (Technically, I
went there once for work in ’96 or so and stayed long enough for a meeting and
a Guinness before flying out again, so I don’t count it.) We stayed in a flat
next door to St. Patrick’s Cathedral that meant we could walk everywhere in
central Dublin.
View this post on InstagramGood morning and Merry Christmas concert from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin
