Of course the first day didn't go smoothly....

Tuesday, July 26th, 2016

8:23 PM Eastern Time

We aren't supposed to get to Dublin till the 27th, but for the sake of the blog I'll start the story now. Years of dreaming, months of planning, and weeks of packing later, and our trip is finally here.

However, before we could leave Ann Arbor, we had to finish packing up our apartment, moving everything into storage. I'd been working on it for weeks, but apparently not hard enough. Today's was possibly the worst experience of my entire life. In the grand scheme of things, I guess that means I've led a pretty charmed life, but there is no denying that today was tough. I have never been that panicked for that long ever before in my life. Turns out, we had a LOT of stuff. And quite a lot of it was destined for the dumpster. And I still had quite a few boxes to pack, and space was getting tight in the storage locker.

We got almost everything done. The storage locker is packed tight, and we've made it to our airplane: I'm writing on board the plane now.

However we have a couple of thanks to send out into the universe before we can really start the trip.

1: My wonderful beautiful friend and neighbor Larisa, who saw how much work I had to do this morning and came down to help me pack while her baby girl was napping. But that's not all.

At one point it became pretty clear that it wasn't going to be physically possible for us to completely clear out the apartment before we needed to get going to the airport. Larisa, in all her kindness and generosity, agreed to finish cleaning out our apartment, saving us from the agony of either missing our flight or paying a sizeable fee to our landlord due to a failure to clean the apartment. We owe her more than we can ever tell her. Needless to say, we will be taking Travis and Larisa (and Eva) to a nice dinner when we get back. Also, I'm putting it I'm writing that, when the time comes, I will fly back to Ann Arbor to help her pack up her home, though I doubt she'll be as disorganized and panicked as me.

2: Thank you to Nina and Oliver for their travel advice, a ride to the airport, and a place to store the stuff  that we couldn't get in to our storage unit. A 10x10 wasn't big enough to hold all our stuff. I shudder to think there was a time we thought a 5x10 would work. Guess we'll be getting a bigger truck too.

The flight to Dulles is taking off. Its about an hour delayed and we have a short layover. Its currently hit or miss whether we'll be making it to Dublin tomorrow morning… fingers crossed.

Me at the Detroit airport, talking to my mom for the last time without Skype for two months

Post note: We made it!