One more day and then we're off to Ireland. The last few days have been a rollercoaster. I'm usually a basketcase before flying anywhere simply because of the whole phobia thing and probably some control-freakishness thrown in there for good measure (the astute among you would probably connect the control-freakishness to the flying phobia and you would probably be right). Add in my total inexperience with transcontinental travel and I'm extra fun.

Today I've been obsessively cleaning the house, which is a nice way to deal with nerves because then you have a clean house. If it hadn't been raining out, I'm pretty sure I would have been hanging out of the windows trying to clean the outsides of them. It's probably good that it was raining.

I'm proud that I've managed to plan and get ready for this entire trip over the last couple of months without crying once. Even tonight when in flash of insight, I suddenly realized that we'd booked our hotel rooms all wrong. We leave on April 8th, but we don't arrive in Ireland until the morning of April 9th. But we had based our entire itinerary on arriving on April 8th. So it turns out we're booked for a hotel room one night before we actually arrive, and it's now too late to cancel that room. Hooray for wasted money and feeling like a complete idiot.

The worst part of that realization is that our carefully planned itinerary is now different. The horror. I've been planning for and looking forward to this particular itinerary. An itinerary that involves arriving in Dublin and having the entire next day to explore and recuperate from our flight before we go all the way across the country to Galway. Now we have to travel across the country the day after we arrive, giving us no time to catch our breath. Change is bad!

However. Part of this point of this entire trip is to get me to do something exciting and memorable and unpredictable, so I know logically that I need to be okay with this little hiccup, because it will probably be the first of many hiccups in the next couple of weeks. So I am taking deep breaths (but not to the point of hyperventilating, thank you very much) and I am not crying. I think this is a good first step.