Some quick background, my maiden name is O'Toole, and my great grandmother came over from Ireland. We've traced her family and are in touch with family in Ireland, but actually have yet to trace the O'Toole name.
Anyways back to the trip!
I booked several months ago, and with four of us going, did some searching to find out when in June we could go for reasonable prices. We picked basically the last two weeks, the 14-28th. The best deal on flights was through US Air, and we had a layover in Philly.
We all met at our house so we could take one car into the city. We drove my car, parked at my work, and took the T into the airport. We left a little later than intended (thanks to some last minute cleanup and packing), but got to the airport with no real trouble. Checkin and Security went smooth, and soon we were on the first leg of our flight! Well... sort of... we actually had to sit on the tarmack for 35 minutes waiting for the traffic to clear. When they first came on, I of course had flashes to that group of people that were stuck on the tarmack for hours on end. But that wasn't us. Right around 30 minutes, we finally got cleared for takeoff.
Though we were behind, we made it to Philly in time to book for our gate and arrived in the nick of time. Eric & I originally weren't sitting together in our first seating assingment, but at checkin, the lady noticed and had moved us to row four. I had hoped for first class, but it turned out to be bulkhead... both a blessing and a curse. My tray-table didnt sit on the arm properly and was quite precarious, there was no real place to keep things like water bottles, kindles, DS's etc... but it was really nice to have all the legroom to spread out. The chicken mean was absolutely awful. I don't know how you mess up peas, but they did, and the chicken was overly salty and bleh. The salad was at least fresh, but I've had much much better airplane food. Heck, I've had tons of microwave meals that were better than this. If we hadn't been running for the gate, I had definitely planned to stop for food, but missed that opportunity. It was getting late anyway as we ate, so we slept as much as we could.
We awoke to them serving coffee, juice & danishes, and were awake in time to catch some of the Irish landscape as we flew over. As seems usual, it was fairly cloudy, but I caught a few photos as we headed in.
Oh and some of you may be wondering why I chose to call a blog about my travels to Ireland "Ramblings of a Cooking Addict". I realized as I started this blog, that I could use it to finally kick off my Recipes blog that I keep talking about on facebook. And truth is, I love exploring new places not just for the beautiful scenery, but also for the food!! So you will see plenty of that in this blog (ahem, bleh airplane food!)!
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