Ireland: Accidental Haggis

Ireland planning is go!

Well, I say "go"...

What's actually happened is that after a week of me defusing stress at work by looking up glorious Ireland things in my lunch break, we've had a Skype chat, me, Claire and Gemma.

It lasted 3 hours.

We have achieved bugger all. Save that we are, of course, all rather excited and that nothing has changed in the insanity stakes - the conversation did rather descend into ridiculousness.

It went something like this:

We tried to find flights at a decent price. We succeeded at this courtesy of Ryanair and Aer Lingus. Wonderful.

Then we had to decide if we wanted to come back on the Saturday or Sunday. We settled on Saturday.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: SELECT DATES

At which point I realised the dates I'd put in Skyscanner were for coming back on the Sunday and when I reset them, the times and prices we'd been considering no longer existed. Buggeration. Anyway, we solved this and settled (possibly) on some new times. So I clicked through to Ryanair to have a closer look at prices, what with extras and everything. Ugh.

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: ROBBING BASTARDS

So, Ryanair flights are cheap, but it's £25 if you want to take a checked in bag. Per flight. Grr. Then again, still cheaper than any of the other airlines, so can't complain.

Still, we didn't actually book any flights because Claire's going to fly from Gatwick and Gemma and I from Manchester. Which means trying to time our arrivals so no one has to wait around for too long. The flights don't match up neatly. Grr. So we settled on sorting this out next week when I'm going to be in Bournemouth with Claire and we don't need a 3-way Skype chat.

We moved on instead to discussing where we want to go and what we might want to do. This currently includes the following:

• Whale watching
• Kayaking
• Horse riding
• Skellig Michael
• Giant's Causeway
• Rathlin Island
• Blarney Castle

 ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: PINS IN THE MAP

 And then there was mention of trying to find Irish food to try. That isn't Guiness. Which resulted in a lot of poking through Wikipedia and getting grossed out by black and/or white pudding. I like black pudding. It's yummy. Claire, apparently, has eaten it accidentally. Also haggis. Hence, accidental haggis. Not sure how this works...

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: OM NOM NOM

The conversation had been making a steady descent into madness for at least an hour (accidental haggis being fairly boring by our standards) when Claire, in the middle of reminiscing about New Zealand, decided on the stupid thing we're going to do in Ireland.

See, when we were in New Zealand, Amy and Claire decided that when we got to Mount Doom (or near enough), Amy would hit me on the head with a rock and then bite Claire's finger off, a la Lord of the Rings. We couldn't initially think of a similar situation for Ireland until Claire remembered that Andrew Scott is Irish. Andrew Scott being Moriarty in BBC's Sherlock.

So now Claire's decided that she's going to shoot herself in the head (Moriarty), I'm going to throw myself off a building (Sherlock) and Gemma's going to stand at the bottom and cry over my lifeless body.

...

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: MURDEROUS INTENT

...

I'm not sure I like this plan...

Now is probably a good time to mention that my dad, who's known Claire for over a decade and knows what we get like when we're together, has asked me repeatedly if Gemma knows what she's getting herself into.

Well, Dad, I don't think we've scared her off yet.

"Yet" being the operative word there.

Ah well, moving on.

We moved on to trying to find a mascot to take with us. I refuse to take a leprechaun, so this resulted in a trawl through the depths of Google in search of a national animal of some sort.

Ireland doesn't have a national animal. The closest we could get was a stag, which is some sort of unoffical thing.

So I toddled off to root through the box of Beanie Babies that live in my cupboard in search of a stag. We don't have a stag, but we do have a deer. I can't find the deer. So I settled on a goat instead, in honour of this 'ere weird photo that we found while trying to find things to do.

Something to do with Puck Fair, which is an old festival type whatnot. I have no idea why the goat is wearing a crown. I think it might be the King...

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: MASCOT GET!

Soooo... all that we achieved in 3 hours of Skyping was clarifying that Claire is a bad influence on me, Gemma isn't easily scared off by said bad influence and that 2 weeks in Ireland is going to be really damn awesome.

Oh, and we found a list of Irish bands for the playlist, of which we'd heard of about a dozen. Oh dear.

In other news, I have no idea why I've been sticking ACHIVEMENT UNLOCKED all over the place. Probably been playing too much Minecraft...