Every gambler knows the secret to surviving

After 24-ish grueling hours, we are settled into our rental house in Kenmare Ireland.  A small and tired woot to that.  Also, it's 9:30pm Seattle time and 5:30am Ireland time and BabyT and I have been awake for  about an hour and a half now.  I'm not sure this is even jet lag.  It's just confusion.

The flight from Seattle to London was not as horrible as it could have been, though my best case scenario of "it's at T's bedtime, so she'll probably sleep through most of it" did not materialize.  She could not get comfortable in her car seat, and only slept maybe 90 minutes total.  Which meant she was a MESS by the time we landed in Heathrow, though to her credit, she seemed to understand that people around her did not want to hear crying and could she please use her words.

And TJ wisely did NOT tell me that the guy in front of him (who reclined his seat right into TJ's lap as soon as we took off) complained to the flight attendant about us.  I would have unleashed the Whoop Ass on him because T was not any more disruptive than that guy's teenage kid who kept coughing and left his TV screen on super-bright in the completely dark cabin.

Fortunately for us, there were other unhappy babies and toddlers on the flight so we weren't "those people" by any stretch of the imagination.  In the end, T watched HOURS of the in flight TV, which was some sort of odd British Teletubbies-like show.  I'm fully ok with that since it kept her (mostly) occupied.

We are not planning to attempt any flights to say, Australia, anytime soon.  That might have been the longest 9 hours of my recent life.

T fell asleep at Heathrow about 30 min before we had to board our flight to Shannon Ireland.  Aer Lingus informed us we could not bring her car seat on board, which made me NOT happy but we were too tired to argue.  They claimed the plane was "too small" when in fact, it's a freakin' Airbus A320.  On which we've installed that seat several times.  Sigh.

The Shannon airport is pretty tiny so we thankfully got out of there quickly, and the only downside was finding out that the online rental car insurance we paid for is not accepted here, and we had to pay for insurance at 24 Euros per day (!!!).  Which I think costs more than the actual car rental.

T slept during the entire 2.5 hour drive, while TJ reminded himself to stay on the left and I tried to navigate the baffling series of roundabouts using only the rental car map.

But we made it.

And we're in Ireland!

Which looks kind of like Seattle, with less cars and people and more sheep and cows.

I'm digging it already.