Another Adventure Begins...

Less than one week after returning from Cozumel, we were off on another travel adventure. Kevin submitted a paper to the 2009 PLDI conference (what does PLDI stand for, you ask? I forgot. Let me go look it up....okay, here it is: "Programming Language Design and Implementation." Yes, very computer sciencey), which is a very prestigious conference in his field. His paper was accepted, which is great for him! And it was great for me, because it meant I got to accompany him to Ireland, where the conference was taking place. It meant that at least part of the trip would be paid for by Purdue, too, which was great. (Just Kevin's plane ticket and the hotel during the conference, of course, but that helped quite a bit!) It also meant that we didn't get to pick the date, which is why we wound up traveling out of the country twice in the same month! I definitely don't have anything to complain about, but I will say that I don't recommend planning trips this close together--if any of you were considering it. That week in between was pretty darn crazy.

Anyways, we again flew out of Chicago O'hare, but this time our flight was in the evening, so we didn't need to go up the night before. We did opt not to drive our own car again, for similar reasons as before. But, the Megabus didn't have a departure time that would work, so we decided to take the Illini Express, which was about 3 times as expensive, but about 10 times as comfortable! Highly recommended.

The 8 hour or so flight went smoothly. I almost forgot to take my Lovenox shot before we took off, so I had the joy of administering the shot on the plane--at least I didn't have to worry about blood clots the whole flight, though. We left on a Friday again this time--we left in the evening and arrived in Dublin on Saturday morning. We flew on Aer Lingus, and we were quite impressed with them--the food was even good! The only bad part is that they have a VERY low weight limit on carry-on luggage (or hand luggage, as they would say in Ireland)--like your carry-on is supposed to be less than 13 lbs. This basically pre-empted any attempt for us to not check luggage (which I would have definitely preferred, so we wouldn't have to worry about lost bags), but oh well. We still had to pack light, because later we would be flying Ryanair, and their luggage restrictions (even checked luggage) are really something else.

Anyways, the flight was fairly uneventful. Kevin and I both couldn't get much sleep, though. Perhaps this is because we have both morphed into extreme night owls, and rarely get to bed before 1am, and it was "only" 2am Illinois time when we landed...but I read my book and the time passed fairly quickly.

Going through customs in Dublin was a MESS and took a long time. The way they have the lines set up is kind of a joke--there are two lines, one for EU passport holders, and one for non-EU. They manage to have the two lines basically cross in the middle. The airport is under construction, though, so maybe it will get better soon.

Kevin's conference didn't actually start until Monday evening, so we had plans to do some sight-seeing in the countryside surrounding Dublin until then. We rented a car--I had paid for it in advance through AutoEurope--from a grumpy Irish lady who forced me to pay for the full tank of fuel upfront (even though AutoEurope claimed that was only an option), but whatever--I didn't have an Irish cell phone SIM card yet, so I couldn't call AutoEurope about it, and we didn't want to go through the hassel of fighting it. The car we rented was a TINY Nissan "Micra", but that's actually for the best on Irish roads! (More on that subject later...) At least it was an automatic, though. I was extremely lucky to have a husband who adapted instantly and perfectly to driving on the wrong side of the road. I'm certain I would have gotten us killed if I had driven, but Kevin was amazing and never made any mistakes--not once did he try to drive on the right side or anything! I am very lucky. The picture above is actually of the second car we rented later on, but it might as well be the same one--they looked identical.

So we set off! Into the wild Irish yonder. I will describe our first day's sightseeing in my next post (it's hard to know where the day cutoff should be when you are writing about flying across so many time zones.)