Dublin

 The best thing about having a kid study abroad is getting to visit them! Not really, but selfishly, that was one of my thoughts when Adam decided to take a summer history course based in northern England - Carlisle. We decided to plan a family trip to coincide with the end of his trip. We'd get to come see where he'd been on his class, and then he could come with us on some adventures. 

Flying into Carlisle isn't a thing. The closest airports are Manchester, Glascow and Edinburgh. After checking out all three, I found us flights on Aer Lingus, which had just started flying direct out of MSP. Adam was on one of the first flights they had out of MSP - it was almost empty! Not so much with ours. We were excited to fly a new airline. You can see our green plane amid all the Delta!

All Aer Lingus flights from the U.S. go direct to Dublin first. We'd never been to Ireland at all - so we planned to spend the day in Dublin. Overnight to Dublin, all day in Dublin, then a commuter hop over to Glascow. Aer Lingus certainly fed us well!

But it was a long flight plus a 6 hour time change, so we were pretty tired when we emerged from the airport in Dublin and got a bus into the center of town. We had a lot
of our stuff with us, since losing any checked luggage was going to be a problem. 

We were totally exhausted. This seemed like a good idea at the time - but in retrospect - we were too tired to appreciate the city. But finally it was time to head back to the airport for our puddle jumper flight over to Glascow. I'd been excited to get seats in the front of the plane - not realizing that we boarded at the back!

This is us the very same day, walking from the Glascow airport to our airbnb, now with every bit of our stuff. It was nice to get moving, and it was only about a mile, but we were exhausted. 

Our airbnb was up three flights of stairs, but finally we could collapse and sleep!