The Eagle Has Landed

Alas, our travels have brought us full circle and we touched down into scenic Newark, New Jersey yesterday, bringing our international wanderings to an end...(that is for the time being, such a comment would be bordering on lunancy when considering the average life expectancy of modern man and the fact that there are still so many incredible places just waiting to be explored....my guess is, given ample time and desire, that this will not be the last jaunt into the cross-cultural experiments of life!...but, perhaps it will be the very beginning of much more, yet that will only be known from a future retrospective viewpoint, which, consequently, may only be arrived at through the passage of time, and, therefore, we must wait and see where and when we end up....so I digress). After arriving in Dublin, having made it out of Athens before the labor strikes (and riots that followed) had taken place, we learned that we had just barely made it in before they began shutting down airports in Ireland and the U.K. due to another cameo performance of the Icelandic ash cloud. We spent the early hours of the morning sleeping on the floor of the Dublin International Airport as we arrived at 2 a.m. and wouldn't be able to check into the hostel until later that day. Eventually we made it to the hostel where we awaited the arrival of the family the following day, which was still up in the air due to the aforementioned ash cloud. Everything worked out, as it always does, and the family arrived in Dublin and the adventures began. We all piled into a mini van and were unleashed onto the streets of Dublin in style (editors note: style, as used in this context, refers not to the physical appearance or dress of the group, but will be used as a synonym for "a box of insanity barreling blindly through narrow roads and major motorways, nearly avoiding death and/or dismemberment, with no real idea of how or when we would arrive at the preselected destination, all this combined with a sprinkling of frayed nerves, picture opportunities, sleep deprivation and hundreds of round-a-bouts in a mad dash to take in as much of the motherland as possible). Style saves the carpals and thus, will be used instead. So, in another slight digression of theme, and to the tune of a stream of conciousness style of modernist journalism, the reader is asked to indulge oneself in, and deeply consider, the fantastic idea that if you ever really want to know the dynamics of your family relations, you must simply recreate the experience of the aforementioned adjective laden description of "style" (please see "editor's note" above should you have any doubt) and repeat said description continually over the course of a week...this is truly a crash course (who loves puns?!) in whether or not you love your family members. (happily, I can say that after having such a trial by fire experience with family, I can answer that I discovered that I do indeed love family, as well as the fact that Cheesburger flavored chips (crisps for those of you that were there) really do taste like a cheeseburger,....truly a human feat to marvel at, and love the fact that great stories and memories are always the result of a family trip. Where were we?...ah, yes, driving in style....we spent the week visiting sights all over Ireland. We arrived at our hotel and settled in before heading out to grab some dinner. We went into town and got some fish and chips (excellent) and some groceries for the night. You ever tried to parallel park a minivan in style from the right, what we consider the passenger side or, ironically, the wrong side? Now that Good times!!! We were able to visit the grave site of relatives in Tullamore, Ireland and see the town where our ancestors would have spent their daily lives....although in much different times. A great experience. We toured the Tullamore Dew distillery and had a sip of the past in the form of that famous Irish liquid fire known as whiskey. Other great sights included a lot of great countryside throughout Ireland, the Lowry's Bar in Clifden (a quaint town on the western coast where we spent the evening in town at a B and B in order to relax and enjoy live music and laughs at the Lowry's Bar...it was a great night), the Cliffs of Moher, which are 600 foot cliffs that plunge directly into the Atlantic ocean in an incredible display of natural beauty, the city of Galway which has a lot of great restaurants, bars and stores, the southern coast where we enjoyed the first taste of the ocean for the first time and kissed the Blarney Stone, (you gotta do it if you are there!, it's just one of those things) and Dublin, where we saw some sights and enjoyed most of them from a post card style view (that meaning that they were closed or time was not sufficient to see them all), but we did get to enjoy a small market in the center of town with fresh olives, horse on a stick and pastries and breads...and a lively feel that made it a great experience. The days were long but the sights were many and the sun was shining for most of the trip, or at least it wasn't raining which was great for enjoying the outdoor sights. It was a bit of a whirl wind overall, but we got to see a lot. I feel like I am still taking it all in as the week passed by so quickly that you almost have to relive the experience vicariously through your own memories in order to remember everything that happened. We all made it out of Dublin on a few different flights, but there were no major complications (at least that I have heard of at this point) and the journey home began. Four months went by quickly and it seemed that the speed of time increased exponentially after the half way point was crossed. We were able to see a lot of amazing sights, meet great people and spend a lot of really great days together. Crisscrossing countries and continent by plane, train, automobiles ("you're going the wrong way!!!-name that movie), by foot, camel and scooter, hitchhiking and hoping, we made it from point A to point B, though not particularly in that order.....and are thankful to have seen what we saw....that's the great thing about traveling, just getting to be here and there and take in this experience called life from different viewpoints....such a valuable tool in life....you get to see how there are so many striking similarities in the human experience even if the culture or language is radically different and you can really learn a lot about yourself and your own culture when it is no longer around you, when you are left to wonder what that is to you, and just when you let yourself think that something like cultural difference separate people, you realize that we are all in this thing together, I've found that laughing and crying are truly universal languages, no matter where you go, if you hear someone laugh or cry, you know exactly what they mean and even more, exactly how they feel, and that a smile goes a long way when you have no idea what someone is saying...speaking of universal themes, it seems that the public subway systems in major cities are among the most depressing places in the world, a modern ferry crossing the river of Styx for business workers at rush hour, zipping across electro-magnetic rails through concrete mole holes of darkness while the blank faces within bob up and down to the monotonous rhythm of the passing ground, staring into some other far away world, that kind of stare that goes right through the walls and bodies, one that is more of a defense mechanism, a total system shut off, more a form of ignoring than staring in a place where eye contact with another person is a taboo not to be broken....the whole thing just feels lonely or lost or something...(maybe that's jut me)......and this happens everyday, all day, with no shortage of volunteers to crawl inside this vial beast...that said (sorry for depressing everyone), I really believe that most people in the world are good people and will help you if you give them a chance to...not always, but more often than not...and either way there is no sense in worrying that the world is out to get you all the time....most likely it'll just cause you to miss out on great experiences....in the end the whole experience and memories that we were able to have during our journey were incredible and G summed up the entire trip amazingly when she said the motto and invaluable life lesson of the trip was that "everything happens for a reason, that you are where you are because that is exactly where you are meant to be". Realizing such a thing really allows you to enjoy the moment and quit worrying. Good things! Well, I guess that is all...I will go back and update and edit some of the other posts as many of them were written in a budget-minded-euro-pinching haste and thus may not include some really great experiences or may be lacking in description...other than that though, Denver will be our next stop after spending a few days with family in Pennsylvania and then a couple days driving across the country...Colorado summer, here we come!!! Team Lowry