Skip to main content

Starting the Irish adventure

The Irish adventure was born in July 2016 as we sweltered through an Arizona summer and saw gorgeous videos of Ireland. It gelled during our two-week trip to Ireland in August. We decided that IF we could sell our house for the right price (we did) and IF I could get Irish citizenship (I did), we would move to Ireland for at least several months. So the journey has begun and here we are in New York City. 
We flew out of Phoenix at 8:00 a.m. via Minneapolis. Something usually goes wrong when we travel to New York and this time was no exception. One of our bags is missing. I left my iPad at LaGuardia (at the Baggage Claim office when I was filing my claim on my lost bag thank goodness.)
But we are here, we have a whole day before we board the Queen Mary so there is plenty of time (I hope!) for my bag to arrive (it's on a plane to LaGuardia as I type) and for me to trek back out to LaGuardia to claim my iPad. Things could have been much worse.
I am feeling tired but not sleepy. We are now well on our way on our adventure. And there are still plenty of tender mercies happening. Just the fact that I am in a comfortable room actually IN New York City is great.
Leaving Scottsdale, packing and unpacking, weighing, unpacking, throwing out or heading over to Goodwill with donations (good-bye extra jacket, good-bye nightgown, my extra pair of boots....), that's all behind us. Ahead of us is a day in New York and on Thursday the ship.
So those are the things I am grateful for tonight--a safe drive to Phoenix Airport in the rental car. No problems checking in, flights on time, enough money to buy food at the airports. A safe (if rather long and hairy) cab ride from LaGuardia. Golly is there a LOT of traffic! It didn't help that we arrived at rush hour and it was pouring rain. I was glad I wasn't the one driving!! The hotel--Hotel Le Bleu--is very comfortable. We are in central Brooklyn, great location.
All in all, a very good day!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Life on board the Queen Mary

Passenger's log on the Queen Mary 2: Dec 9th - First Day at Sea Didn't sleep well--think it was the soused mackerel at dinner. Anyway, R and I woke up at about 6:00 am and discussed the order of the day. Quite the swell outside and I can feel the roll of the ship. (No seasickness thank goodness!) Despite the mackerel, I was hungry so we went to King's Court at 6:30 a.m. Buffet with loads of choice of course. We sat in an alcove looking out at the ocean. Our server was from Croatia, Slavan. I asked him my burning question of the day--why did we get a free bottle of wine but a regular bottle of Diet Coke cost $3.75? Diet Pepsi is $1.00 less. Fruit juices are free on tap. Coffee, tea, milk, ditto. But you have to pay for soft drinks. Very odd. Slavan says it is because Cunard can't get a good contract with Coke. Hmmm.... our local School District back in Sierra Vista can negotiate .50 a can for the soda machines in the teachers' lounges but Cunard has to cha...

There's got to be a morning after

And today is the fourth "morning after", with each "night before" a little easier, a little more "make the best of it but take care of yourself." Before I move back to writing this memoir style blog--going to continue with the South Africa trip of 1977--I feel I would be shrinking if I didn't say something about how I feel about this week's US election. As of this writing, Saturday, Arizona still hasn’t finished its count—the GOP did a great job of preventing the mail-in vote for being counted early and messing up the ability to use the machines—so I still don’t know if we are going to be saddled with the odious Kari Lake or whether the House is going to be Republican too. Still, it’s becoming more “academic” than visceral for me, if you know what I mean. Necesitamos avanzar. Sera dificil, sabiendo que muchos, especialmente aqui donde vivo, creen en los planes de Trump y Vance. (I have been practicing Spanish in preparation for a 10-day December cr...

December in South Arica 1977, Part One

 December in South Africa 1977, Part One I had never understood candlelight in quite this way before. Oh there had been candles on the table Christmases past back home in Canada. For atmosphere, for festivity. While the electric crystal chandelier above cast the “real” light on a table laden with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce.… But this, this was different. Here in the corrugated iron shack that my friends had referred to as “the cottage”—not any cottage that I had ever seen in my growing up in Quebec—with no other light either inside the cottage nor outside in the black night of the Transkei, I understood how candlelight could draw a world down into the narrowness of those around the light, as if nothing else in the world existed.  I looked at the six faces around the table, illuminated in the candlelight, my own pulsing with sunburn. "Oh you’ll be grand," they’d told me down at the beach that day. "We’ll tell you when to get out of the sun." And toni...