It's finally happened! All our flights are officially booked! The last flight, from Paris to Portugal is finalized and official! We were waiting on this one because there was a debate on whether we wanted to travel by train or by plane, the main issue being that we'd already booked the AirBnB's with the idea that we were flying and it would be an extra day before we arrived if we took the train. The secondary issues was, as always, money. Our mother thought it would be cheaper to take the train, but as it turns out that wasn't the case and it was almost $100 cheaper per person to fly. It was also less fuss given that the train from Paris only went into Spain and we would have to catch another train to finish the trip to Portugal. After sorting out all of that, it was, naturally, still a hassle and a half to actually successfully finish the booking, but we made it happen. Once again the credit card company decided the flight was a fraudulent purchase and blocked us out three times before a call was made. While I'm of course grateful to have a credit card company that is doing a bang-up job protecting us from fraud, but after purchasing four other flights between the same countries I would say the purchase of another one is sort of characteristic at that point.
This means we have all the air transportation taken care of and housing for Paris and Portugal set. The final step is to figure out where we're staying in Ireland. According to my mother, we're staying everywhere. Ha. She assembled a list of contacts in a notebook which she gave to us to make copies of which we promptly forgot to do until this afternoon when I scanned them and emailed the copies back to my mother. She will, apparently, begin making calls and sending emails to figure out who of our relatives can put us up and when. I, naturally, know none of these people, which means I really have no power in the matter. According to my mother all of them will be delighted to see us and put us up for a day or two, but we'll know for certain once she begins making calls and whatnot. Then we come to the matter of figuring out how we're going to get to all of these relatives places all over Ireland. Seeing as I've never been to Ireland and rarely use buses anymore (the ones down south 'are what they are' after all and walking is always cheaper) using the bus and metro system is going to be an adventure in an of itself. Such grandeur comes at a cost though and we'll have to think about that while we figure out this bouncing-around-Ireland adventure. Thus far, that part of the trip sounds like it will be the most stressful and exhausting. Exciting, of course, but my previous statement remains intact.
On another note, we also made a purchase of two other necessary items: Money belts and a universal adapter. Money belts are supposed to be quite useful and I found an excellent deal of two for $10 and while they may be cheaper, the price is right and we might only use them once, so it works for me! Now, the universal adapter was a bit pricier. We got a $20 one that has all the adapters, two regular plugs, and two USB ports. It's not an unreasonable price, but my issues stems from the necessity of it at all. Now I could Google it, but I'm far to lazy and would rather gently complain. I just can't understand why there wasn't a universal design for plugs anyway. Was there some kind of council at any point where they asked "Hey, should we make all the designs for plugs the same all over the place?" and some guy in the back was like "What if we made them all different and forced people to spend their money on more clutter for their house and travel bags?" and the council erupted in a applause and gave him a medal or something. Probably an American ambassador. Typical. Regardless, we did purchase those items and as of today they have shipped and should be here in no time (thanks Student Prime) and the official packing process can formally begin! I do have a list started, but as we're still 2 weeks out it would just be nonsensical to start packing. I know too many people who begin the process of packing at least a month in advance and then realize they need to use approximately everything they've already packed and that's how mistakes happen. All that 'taking out to use' and 'putting back in when you're done' is just a recipe for disaster and we're already all over the place with everything else as it is so I would rather like my packing to proceed without incident if that's quite alright with everyone.
If this seems like a cluster of nonsense, it's probably because it is. The gist of all of this suggests that most of the main stuff is set but we've still got all kinds of bizarre arrangements to handle and planning to make and neither of us actually know how to do any of that given that we've never done any of this before. Everything is a bit all over the place in terms of what's handled and what needs handling and how everything is going to end up. If there is one thing I've learned from this journey already it's that no matter how hard one tries to be organized, there's just no way to linearly plan for travel and you just have to get used to it. As far as I'm concerned we're falling into "we'll deal with it when we get there" territory and while I'm not sure how I internally feel about that I know for certain we're headed into the great unknown we like to call: adventure.
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