We Take Ourselves With Us

It was Thanksgiving! Which means absolutely nothing in Ireland--though, oddly, they still lean heavily into Black Friday sales. I guess capitalism gonna capitalism everywhere, made up history or no made up history. Being directly on the coast, Galway has changeable weather, but it was pretty clear that rain was in the forecast throughout the day. So, we rolled the dice and booked our trip to the Cliffs of Moher for ... (say it with me) Black Friday and set off for breakfast at Esquires, which was very well rated and showed gf options. We were greeted by a lovely, talkative older gentleman who apologized for our wait for a table, decried their short staffing, and shared that none of the young people wanted to work anymore. (To be fair to him, we saw the same proliferation of "help wanted" signs in Galway that we found in Dublin, but given its more remote location, I'm guessing Galway has even more of a challenge post-COVID. In fact, some of the restaurants had messages on ...

So, this summer, we had an amazing trip to Iceland planned.  We were going to ride the small Icelandic ponies, soak in the blue lagoon, and stalk Bjork.  Instead I spent about a week in the hospital, found out one of my kidneys was dead and infected (that’s a twofer), got a nephrectomy tube for a while (look it up, it’s super gross), had surgery to remove said kidney, and couldn’t lift anything heavier than gallon of milk for about six weeks.  Goodbye, Iceland; hello, binge-watching Wild, Wild Country and home nurse visits.  What a great summer. Oh, and when I wasn’t binging Netflix shows about cults, I started planning a reboot vacation around Thanksgiving holiday.  Iceland’s not as attractive an option in November as it is in August.  Enter Hawaii!  On reflection, this selection may have been in part unconsciously influenced by my watching the entire Brady Bunch Hawaii arc on MeTV while I was in the hospital. Eager readers of this blog (...

It was the morning after Thanksgiving, and all through the room, most of the family wanted to sleep until noon.   But, instead, we dashed away, dashed away, dashed away all ... the way to the corner of the next block for some breakfast before setting off for the Lower East Side.  Two things I've never gotten to in NYC that I wanted to do this trip: the Tenement Museum and the Ellis Island Museum.  The latter is still being reconstructed after Hurricane Sandy, but I was able to book a tour of the former.  It's fair to say no one--but me--was very excited by the prospect of touring a tenement.  But, they were being good sports. Since we were heading away from all the Black Friday crowds, the subway was completely empty, which enabled my monkeys to work up some energy. Our foray to the museum got off to a rocky start: we jumped into the long line on Orchard Street that we assumed was for the tour, only to learn that it was a line...