All Things Go

Galway during the Arts Festival

“We're drinking my friend, To the end of a brief episode, Make it one for my baby, And one more for the road."
--Johnny Mercer

What stands now as three grand weeks of adventure across the pond will, with certainty, seem like a brief episode years from now. But what an episode.

All things come to their end, and so too the Yank's European excursion. Having just finished a return trip to Ireland, where we spent two nights in Galway and then back to Dublin for a day and night, nearly everyone has come home to the States. As I write this message from New York, Hetty has hopefully made a flight out of Dublin and is airborne. Chris, Ashley, Stephanie, and myself (along with the already returned Shane) have left behind the fair green lands of the British Isles. Our last days, after leaving Scotland, were spent on the other side of Ireland, in Galway, during the annual Arts Festival.

We didn't participate in any directly related festival activities, but the little Irish city was certainly in the celebratory spirit and there was music everywhere. It was a great time to have visited. I dropped the ball and recorded no video whilst there, but Chris and the girls snapped some fantastic photos of the town and the coastline. All three girls were with us, as we serendipitously met up with Ashley and Stephanie on the train from Dublin to Galway, they having just flown in from spending the week in Italy and Munich.

Thus we began our trip in Ireland, and so ended it. We rode the train back to Dublin our last day and returned to Abraham House hostel, all the while experiencing a feeling not unlike returning home. For Chris and I's part, the entire trip went as smoothly as silk, and--after we actually made it to Europe--things were about as amazing as one could hope for. We watched the Wimbleton finals from in HDTV while in London, arrived hot on the heels of the Tour de France in Barcelona, saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona, gazed in awe at the fireworks on the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Bastille Day, processed fresh sides of beef on a Scottish farm, gained ten pounds while being spoiled by the nicest Glaswegian in the world, and danced jigs to traditional Irish reels long into the Galway night.

Thus does the journey come to a close, at least for now, for the Yanks Across the Pond.