Getting Ready

For the last three or four months I have been scouring the internet, researching the cities in Ireland that we will be visiting, readying myself for the kinds of activities we'll participate in.

Grand Circle offers lots of information on their website. It's just a matter of digging deep into the menu and clicking on various buttons. Their topics range from regional temperatures (50's & 60's) to popular eateries. They show several lists of travel and packing tips plus many "must-see" suggestions from Tour Directors. If you have the time, you can uncover a world of helpful insight there.

Then I investigated all the hotels we'll be staying in and find each of them to be first class in every respect. We'll have two and three night stays throughout our journey. One very appealing factor in this trip is the more leisurely pace of the tour. We can choose to go out every day, or perhaps stay back in a city and explore it on our own. I'm looking forward to that.

The internet has been very helpful in uncovering things to do in every town.

Today we received our "Final Document Booklet" with name and luggage tags, final air itinerary, passenger/traveler list, and hotel information. We are less than three weeks from departure and now I'm starting to feel the urgency of getting prepared. I need to pull out the clothes I plan to wear, make sure everything is clean and will be adequately warm, get all my travel-size toiletries together and packed, charge my camera batteries... and on and on.

Anyone with eyes and ears knows about the swine-flu frenzy in the global media!
I vacillate from sensing some seriousness about it to being irritated with the over-reaction that we're bombarded with. But I have enough sense to be cautious and pay closer attention to sanitation and cleanliness that is so taken for granted in the U.S. So these are the items I picked to have on the airplane to try to keep us virus-free.
We'll be abuzz with activity over the next couple weeks as we plan our packing strategies and go through several changes until we come to just the right configuration or run out of time!
Now, I just need to keep Treasure from guessing what we're up to!