honeymoon day two

I'm ready! I'm ready! I'm ready!

Those of you who are Spongebob fans may recognize my little cheer there. Hey, I have to get myself psyched up to write about something happy after this morning. So here I am, ready to tell you about honeymoon, day two.

I awoke on the plane to Paris and stretched, but something went wrong. My left calf cramped like it had never cramped before. Just from a stretch! I tried to rub it out like I was taught to during lifeguarding lessons at the Garden City pool, all those years ago (just about the only knowledge and/or skill I retained from those days, since I don't really like to swim anymore), and thought I was successful. I got up to walk the ten steps to the bathroom and almost fell over. My, that hurt. It did for a day or so afterward, too. But enough about my leg.

As I said yesterday, I'm kind-of hazy on the breakfast thing. I think I was tired, not hungry, or didn't like the food, but I didn't eat it. Al did, watching his movies all the while. He hadn't slept a wink, even in the dark cabin with the stretch-out-so-you're-almost-lying-down comfy seats that we had. When we landed in Paris, it was around 9:00 am local time and our plane was at 10:00 something. In Detroit they had told us to get our boarding passes from Paris to Dublin in Paris, so off to the ticket counter we went.

Screeching halt. We went to the ticket counter and immediately knew something was wrong, because the clerk started speaking to her supervisor in French. My two years of high school French didn't allow me to follow the conversation very well (at all). Finally, she turned to us and told us, "Yes, they told you you'll be on the 10:00ish flight, but they didn't book you on it and there aren't any business class seats left. You'd have to fly coach. You'd also have to go through customs and then run across the airport, because that flight is boarding in a few minutes. Do you want to do that, or do you want to wait until a 2:00 flight?"

Ugh. Stupid Northwest. I thought about my leg, still hurting whenever I put a lot of pressure on it. Run? Across an airport? And what if we got held up in customs? Al was thinking we didn't want to take a chance either, so we opted for the later flight. That's how we ended spending four hours sitting around in an airport in Paris. We read, we people-watched, we looked around in shops, but why buy a Paris souvenir when all you see is the airport? To me, airports are neutral territory if you never leave them. Non-countries. No, I was never in France. Just in an airport and a plane in France, which is different. Anyway. I managed to order my lunch en francais, with the correct pronunciation and all--and the guy behind the counter understood me, and I understood him. Yay, high-school French!

In the Paris airport, police walk around in threes and greet each other when they see another group. The men shake hands politely, the women (and men greeting women) take hold of each other with both hands and kiss each other lightly on both cheeks. The Paris airport also has young military lads walking around in groups wearing camouflage and carrying large guns. Are the French at war? That's something I've never seen in Detroit--or Chicago, or Newark, and definitely not in my little college town.

We finally boarded the plane to Dublin, and by this time I was looking and feeling rather greasy and wiped out. It ended up being a tiny, old plane and the "business class" was a three-seater row shared by two people instead of three. How generous of them. They offered us champaigne, vodka, or orange juice. I wanted the vodka and orange juice, but just took the juice and promptly fell asleep. I woke up after the meal was served and gone. The flight attendant offered me a meal then, but Al said it wasn't very good, so I declined and watched out the window, which is when I took this picture. I awoke when we were flying over part of England and then on to Ireland. We weren't very high, and it was beautiful. By the time we landed--at 3:30ish, I was ready to get off the plane and excited for the real honeymoon to begin. But even though I was ready, the honeymoon wasn't.

Ugh. We waited fifty minutes for the bus that the lady at the ticket counter said would take us where we were going. When we got on, we had to go to the upper deck and sat in the front at the window. There was no air conditioning, and since it was one of their sunny-ish days, it was fairly hot. We didn't fit with us and our luggage in one row, so we sat in rows across from each other. Then a woman asked if she could sit next to me, and of course I said yes. I knew Al was already frustrated, because our destination wasn't even on the bus map and the bus driver told us it would take at least an hour to get there--we were stopping at every stop along the way. And it did take an hour, maybe more. But there weren't clear postings on the streets that corresponded to the map, so we had no idea where to get off. We asked the lady next to me; she didn't know, but another woman was kind enough to tell us we still had a "longish way to go--about twenty minutes" and told us what to look for. By the time we got to the hotel (Camden Court Hotel), it was 5:30 pm and we were pretty beat--we had been travelling for about 24 hours.

After we checked in, Al called his cousin, Patricia. We were meant to arrive in Dublin at 5:30 am, which would have given us all day to mosey around and then meet up with her for dinner. But our twelve-hour delay had worn us out, so we decided we'd just find a place to eat by ourselves and meet up with her the next day. The only problem was that we'd miss seeing her sons, Sean and Daragh, who we'd met last year (we took them to Cedar Point, and they are still convinced it is the best place in the world). I took a shower and asked if we could take a nap before eating. Al didn't want to, but since he laid down while I was showering, he was in need of a nap. I ended up staying up, afraid that neither one of us would wake up if we both fell to sleep--there was no clock in the room, and our phones weren't working, so I couldn't set an alarm. We went out to find something to eat around 7:30 or 8:00, and were surprised to discover that many places don't serve food at all--pubs are just pubs, drinking establishments, and if they do serve food, it's only between certain hours and we were too late. We ended up eating six-inch tall burgers at a place called Bobo's Gourmet Irish Burgers. They were pretty good, and the onion rings--served with mayo, french style--were the best I've ever had. Yummy! (No weight-watching on the honeymoon, I'm afraid.)

Back to the hotel room, stifling hot with no air-conditioning and only an open window to try to stave off the humidity from the previous week ("the weather was great last week!" everyone kept telling us), we fell fast asleep...

To be continued tomorrow