A Month in the US

It's been a long time since I have written anything because we have been on the road in the US. We've been here almost a month and it's hard to believe how fast time flies! We have had some great times visiting friends and family, eating all of our favorite foods and shopping up a storm. But all good things must come to an end. We leave for Ireland in 2 days and I'm starting to get nervous about overweight luggage. :(

It was super fun for us to be here during the most historic election in memorable history! We were glued to all of the news coverage and were celebrating the fact that the nation spoke loudly about wanting change. It is such a great country and now we have hope that rebuilding is possible.

We will arrive back in Galway on Sunday morning. The funny thing is that we will leave early Tuesday morning for a trip to Portugal! I know, crazy, huh? That means that we'll go to work on Monday, then take the train to Dublin in the evening so we can fly at 7am Tuesday! We won't even be back on Irish time, so I'm sure we'll both be a bit tired. Marco has some meetings to attend in Porto, which is in the North, and I couldn't resist tagging along. Portugal is one of the places on my "list", so I'm really excited. We're flying into Lisbon and taking the train to Porto. After the meetings, we'll head back to Lisbon and spend the weekend exploring. We've heard lots of great things about the city, so it should be fun.

Then we will come back to Galway and 3 weeks later I head to South Africa for the holidays. Marco will come a week after I go and we'll stay through the first week of January. We're both looking forward to the trip and I'm really excited to introduce Marco to Africa!