56 Days of obsessing over details left...

OK, so here I am, 56 days out from what will probably be the coolest adventure of my life and I'm swatting at details the way fat people swat gnats in Walmart. I already knocked out the big stuff - air, rental car and hotel reservations; a general idea of what I'll do when I get there; and how I'll pay for everything. I am, however, obsessing over SIM cards at the moment.



But, I digress...



I have wanted to go to Ireland for a large number of years, but it always just seemed like something that other people did. Over time, that ridiculous notion was gradually replaced by a "why not?" philosophy.



One by one, I killed the reasons why I couldn't go to Ireland. The last remaining impediment was the realization that, in the entirety of my 49 years, I had never gone by myself on vacation. Sure, I have traveled alone on business lots of times and traveled by myself to meet friends and/or family at a pre-determined location, but never had I gone somewhere alone, to a completely new place for the purpose of this thing they call "fun". Interesting concept, but it seemed, well, frivolous and unnecessary. I am lead to understand, though, that the lack of necessity and frivolity are, in fact, the point of such an exercise. Hmm, interesting concept.



After entirely too much thought and consultation with my advisers, we determined that the easiest way for me to wrap my mind around this whole, purposeless, squishy concept of "fun" would be to make the vacation "task-oriented". Ahhh, now there's a concept I can roll around in the mud with! One of my advisers suggested that since I would be going in the November/December window, I could make my mission that of acquiring various chachkis from the native population with the intent of distributing said acquisitions to (primarily) the fruit of my offspring (known collectively as "the little people"; the 4th Gen; or simply "the grandkids"). Since this over-arching task had been fleshed-out I was soon staring across the Atlantic with nothing in my way except my own will.