Shameless Plugfest - "A Journey to Ireland"

It occurred to me, recently, that there’s a lot of stuff on my web site (michaeloconnell.com, in case you haven’t caught on). And that not all of this stuff has been found by people. Aside from there just being a lot of said stuff, this stuff is sometimes buried beneath OTHER stuff, making people wade through Stuff #1 to get to, say, Stuff #7. People may not get that far, so some stuff might get missed. Or, there’s this other scenario, where people have, like, jobs and families and numerous other more important things to do than dick around on my web site all day. I apologize. I meant “penis around”.

So I thought I’d use this much more accessible and user-friendly blog to occasionally point out some highlights you might have missed. This ongoing feature will be known as Shameless Plugfest. And I thought I’d get things started with a little trip to Ireland.

In case you missed “A Journey to Ireland”, the web page I did up for my…well, my…journey to Ireland (sometimes the most obvious title can be the one that requires the least effort, so, I figured why penis around with some flowery metaphorical epithet when my time could be better spent watching a Bond movie on TBS or something?), I thought you might enjoy checking it out now. In the Fall of 2002, I came to a realization that nothing on my life list was getting done. And I figured the best way to fix that was the shoot for the #1 thing on that list. But, since Gwen Stefani was already married by that point (tramp), I decided to jump on #2 instead, even though jumping on #1 sounded like much more fun. And this was taking a trip, finally, to my homeland – to Ireland. I talked to Russ about this one evening over cigars on his patio, overlooking the golf course, and before I could even finish the thought, he said “Let’s do it”. For those of you who are fans of “How I Met Your Mother”, Russ is my Barney. So as you can imagine, he felt this trip would be legen…(wait for it)…DARY. We brought it up to several of our other friends, and they all whined about things like mortgages and car payments and braces for the kids and crap like that. Why do we bother?

So, we set the date for just after St. Paddy’s day in 2003 (as we felt going ON St. Paddy’s was just way too obvious and touristy). We decided we would plan NOTHING. No reservations, no idea where we were going, nothing. We’d just land in Dublin, find a rental car, and see where we ended up. Did we consider it a bad omen that our flight to Europe ended up taking off just hours after the U.S. started dropping the first bombs on Iraq? Not at all! We figured the possibility of getting spit on and protested the minute we got off the plane would be the perfect way to start a week on the Emerald Isle!

So if you missed it the first time around, take this chance to join us on our adventure by reading the travel journal and checking out all the photos. Excitement, intrigue, many pints and close encounters with painted sheep (it sounds creepier than it was…kind of…) await you HERE!