Vacation Day 1

The day before we left for vacation, our dog Willow, went out for a night time adventure! We had a million things to do to get ready for our trip!  I went outside and saw Willow on our front porch, scared, trembling and looking like she was in trouble.  Oh no, someone left the gate unlocked and she had been out all night.  She was covered in burs, had scratches on her face and worst of all...she had been sprayed by a skunk!!  This is not what we wanted to deal with that day!  I let my cutest friend Liza, who was watching Willow while we were gone, know what happened.  She was so sweet and said to go ahead and bring her over.  We bathed her twice and got the burs out, but she was still pretty stinky!  Oh the joys of having a dog!!

We got up early on Wednesday July 31st and did our last minute packing for our trip.  It was cheapest to fly out of Chicago, and since we were parking our car for so long, we decided to take the train into Chicago.  Our sweet friend Denise took us to the train station to start our journey

We enjoyed our train ride!  We saw a lot of beautiful scenery along the way and enjoyed the peaceful ride.

 

We arrived in Union Station in Chicago.

 

We walked around for a bit looking for the subway station.  We each had 2 suitcases, which made it a little interesting!  We found it and made our way from the subway station to the airport.  In the airport we ate Uno's pizza.  This made Chris happy! We had to experience Chicago!

 We first had a 2 hour flight to Philadelphia, PA.  It went smooth and we had a two hour layover.  We thought we would grab dinner and had chick-fil-a.  This made ME happy!  We then boarded our plane for our 7 hour flight to Dublin.  We were so happy to be on the final stretch and our Ireland vacation finally seemed to be a reality for us!

 This was the most comfortable plane we were on.  It was one of those pinch me I am dreaming moments

 The girls were excited and ready to go!

 Tiana gets nervous to fly, but she was brave, maybe even a little silly!

Chris and I were tired, but so extremely happy and excited to go!  This was my first time to ever need a passport.  Most of our vacations have been local or to see family, so this was a grand adventure for us. Do you know how much I love this man??   We tried our best to sleep on the plane, since we would be arriving in Dublin at 8:45 am the next morning.  It was literally a day of planes, trains and automobile.