After our 6 a.m. wakeup call and the last of our daily cappuccinos and cornettos, croissant-like rolls that are the nearest the Romans have to a universal breakfast food, Dana and I got bussed out to the airport. We had annoying Irish kids on our flight; the girl next to Dana put a handful of Maltesers in an empty Pringles can and shook it until her Dad told her not to, whereupon she laughed at him, he did nothing and she resumed shaking. Across the aisle, the ADD-racked boy sitting next to me kept quoting a line he claimed was from The Simpsons but which I’d never heard (and now can’t recall) while he opened and shut the windowshade until I wanted to reach over his ineffectual mother and punch him in the neck.
Back in Ireland, we were greeted by a downpour, then gorgeous sunny skies only minutes later, in the grand mercurial fashion of the country. I got a pint of Guinness with Dana at her house’s favored pub, Granger’s, shortly after which I shipped back out to the airport for my six-hour-plus return flight to JFK.
My gift from Aer Lingus was a half-full plane upon which I could stretch out and sleep. I discovered that I require the width of three seats for this purpose; or, expressed as an algebraic equation, 3s=J. There was a jackass family on this flight, too, with three kids that kept running around as if their brains were being bombarded by prions, while their father, a large tattooed meatsack whose neck was the diameter of my waist, shouted unheeded advice from his seat in a gravy-thick New York accent.
The travel may have been rough, but the vacation itself was, as they say, molto bene.