Dublin

Arrived in Dublin. O'Callaghan Davenport hotel is nice. Cornucopia Wholefoods for lunch / dinner is brilliant! Parsel is amazing, and raw quiche is a perfect dinner.

Followed by free map-grabbing and a photo op at the tourist center of Ireland.

It's a Small World

Or, The International Terminal at Chicago O'Hare.

Yay, another full body xray Again.
We purchased our 50 Euros for the low low price of $87.

Dinner choices were few, but we did find a nice Italian restaurant.  $34 later, we were happily stuffed on tocco's pizza & panini.

And for dessert, we bought candy bars from Hudson's.  (Almost as expensive as dinner was...)

Now we're all ready to wait the 4 hours until our 6+ hour flight boards.

Leaving NC

RDU website suggests you arrive four hours early for intl flights.  We arrived two and a half hours early and had an hour and a half of sitting and waiting time.
Let the day of sitting and waiting begin!  (eventually)

During gate checkin, the security guy was distressed that I snuck my passport through the full body scanner in my pocket, rather than putting it in a bin to go through the xray conveyor belt.  He obsessed with flipping through each page of my passport (looking for hidden kmives, etc. no doubt), while completely ignored my 1" thick wallet.  Anyway,  apparently airports get paid to xray everyone through the full body scaner now. yay! free cancer. thx homeland obscurity!

Aer Lingus didn't tell us that united air was really our airline, so we didn't get to pick our seats to ORD.

UK Materials

Since we'll be taking our Google Nexus 7 tablet with us, we decided it would be worth it to make a nice Google Map of some of the attractions and restaurants we plan to visit. Click here to check it out.

This tablet fits almost perfectly in a cargo-pants pocket; great for traveling.

Preparing for the UK

Checklist:

Step 1:  Schedule two weeks off work.

Step 2:  Reserve airline tickets, hotels, and train travel.

Step 3:  Figure out how bad the exchange rate is between the Euro and the dollar.  :(

Step 4:  Watch Netflix BBC programs YouTube video to learn English "proper".