Based on Bren: Making London a Home

This past weekend, Morgan and I traveled to the town of Killarney, Ireland. It is about two hours away from the city of Cork! It was absolutely, completely beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous and I felt so absorbed in the beauty of my surroundings when we were there.

The trip? Totally worth it and I have no regrets in going, despite the freezing weather, gusty wind, and fairly consistent rain! However, travelling was not as easy as I anticipated. I always heard how easy and cheap it is to travel around Europe, so I had the expectation that it would be a breeze! True, it was very cheap! Our round trip flights were about $60 each and all the transport to and from each airport was only about $25 each! So, the travel part was cheap and that was definitely a perk! Go Ryanair! Getting there and back though was veeerrry involved! To and from Ireland required six different bus rides, two tube rides, a train, and two planes!! It was about nine and a half hours of pure travel each way (and the plane ride was only one hour of that time, the rest of it was spent on buses, trains, tube and waiting)!! Considering Ireland is really only about an hour away, we were kind of bummed at how long traveling took and it proved to be pretty dang exhausting!

I loved Ireland and would highly recommend going! However, all the travel made me realize that I really want to make London a home and I don’t have a desire to travel somewhere new every single weekend I am here. Travelling is stressful, involved, costs money, and is kind of a lot of work. And sometimes, I feel a lot of pressure to travel every possible place I can since I am here in Europe and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any experience! People always talk about all these cool places they have been and all the places they want to go and it makes me feel like I should want to go to all those places too. But then I have to remember that this time I have to study abroad is really about me and how I want this experience to be. So because of that, Morgan and I set a list of our top priority places. So, we have tickets to Amsterdam and Wales during our program, and then France and Italy for travelling after our program ends!! I totally understand the desire for people to travel every weekend and completely support that. But I have decided that travelling every weekend is not for me because I want to experience as much of London as possible and to really make it feel like home. Plus, after all, there is so much to do here in this fabulous (and quite large) city!!!

Not to be a negative Nancy though because our trip to Ireland seriously was soo awesome and we loved it!! So here's a little about it!

Morgan and I did the six hour Ring of Kerry bus tour, which was definitely the highlight of our trip. Our tour guide was incredibly entertaining and we were able to stop at several different viewpoints, villages, the Killarney National Forest, etc.! We loved it and it was a great way to see so much of Ireland considering we were there for such a short amount of time!

So here are some of the highlights from the Ring of Kerry!!