Trip of a Lifetime

Trip of the Year

Not everybody gets the chance to travel over seas in their lifetime and certainly not when they are only eighteen years old. To some kids the family road trip to Wisconsin or Iowa was the big vacation of the year. I guess you could say I was fortunate enough to get the experience of traveling to Ireland with some of my closest friends.

It was my senior year spring break, my class was all ready to set out for a wild adventure in Barceló, Mexico for a full week of sunshine, unlimited booze and no rules. When I told my friends I wasn’t going on the class trip to Barceló but instead going to Ireland with the school choir they paused, looked at me and laughed and simply asked “why”. Its understandable why they would think that going to Ireland with your school and parent chaperones would be less of a trip than Mexico with all of your friends. At first when I decided to travel with the choir instead I thought I had made a horrible decision, because my entire grade besides my choir friends had been talking about how amazing and unforgettable the trip would be. My friend Ryan would say “have fun with dean miller and the mountain goats”. All I was thinking was what did I get myself into with this trip.

Coming home from school I would tell my parents how sad I was to be going to Ireland and not Mexico, looking back I can’t believe I ever said that, mainly because my parents had dropped a couple grand for me to take an incredible trip to see the world and I was fretting over not drinking cheap, watered down tequila with my friends in 100-degree weather. I have been in choir with the same people since we were in the first grade, so saying we were all pretty tight knit would be an understatement. When we were touring around from city to city in Ireland the first couple of days were a little rough to say the least we were jet lagged, hungry but mainly cold. The cold there is a chilled to the bone cold a lot different seemingly worse than Minnesota cold. After a couple days we got some sleep, adjusted to the time difference plus learned how to dress in layers for the life in Dublin. That’s when the real fun started we went from castle to castle stopping at everything and anything to get just one more picture. In reality all the castles looked the exact same. We went from the city of Dublin to the mountains in Cork. Being in Ireland felt like being in another universe, it was so different from what I was used to, the culture, people, atmosphere nothing was the same everything was simply better. I was constantly moving the only time we were sitting down was to eat and sleep. It wasn’t relaxing at all but peaceful in a way that made It worth the blisters from 10 plus miles of walking each day. Of course there was a couple times throughout the trip when I would think why on earth did I go somewhere for spring break where its cold and rains all