The Journey Begins - United Kingdom and Ireland

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British Isles

This travel log is the first of a series detailing an around-the-world trip I took between July 1 and December 20, 2001.

July 1: Chicago O'Hare

The Cardiff Castle in ccastle-dense Wales

It's been a long process getting to this point; this is something I thought about for a few months. It's fun to say, "I'm going to travel around the world." But when you actually hand in your leave of absence and decide to leave it's a bit different. I have two pair of pants, a pair of sandals, tennis shoes and walking boots, five shorts, five shirts, two sweatshirts and a coat, and a couple more dress shirts. We'll see if I packed too heavy, I think I might have. I look down and realize that for the next six months, I'm going to be living out of this backpack.

I needed to do a lot of things before I left. I figured out where I wanted to go, by just getting a world map and marking places. I started doing some research, and deciding specifically what I wanted to see. I looked at some around-the-world tickets, but bought the airline tickets through a local consolidator. Traveling Europe was something I wanted to do after I left college, so I did get a two-month Eurail pass.

Then I started looking at travel insurance. I got one though the Internet but it apparently looks pretty good. I dealt with other things, figuring out how to pay expenses, getting an American Express card, traveler's checks, international cards, and student cards.

I went through a period of being excited and then being scared. I heard two reactions from people. One is, "You're an idiot, you could invest that money and retire a few years early." The other one is "What a great idea". But it was a difficult decision even though I don't have kids or a house or am married. However, I have the security of a paycheck every two weeks, and I got to the point where I wasn't living paycheck to paycheck. I was starting to get comfortable. I'm taking a chance in probably coming back and struggling financially.

I made up a series of excuses of why not to go. I came up with some like, I'll miss all the Packer football games and family and friends and money was a concern, too. It's obviously going to be an expensive trip, but when I looked at the option of not going I decided I had to go.

July 2
I arrived in London and went to Victoria Station, which is the bus station to go to Cardiff. Originally, I planned Cardiff because I wanted to go to Ireland by ferry and I was going to go to Bath or Cardiff, but Cardiff was more on the way. I left London about 11 a.m. and arrived in Cardiff about 2:30 in the afternoon. It was nice to see some of the British countryside because I never saw that last time I visited, last time I just saw London and Oxford.

Eventually I made it to Cardiff and I was able to find Cardiff Backpacker's Hostel where I stayed. I realized I packed too much, so I sacrificed a couple of the books, shampoo and contact solution. I made it to the Cardiff Castle, which was pretty interesting. It's a pretty decent city, I never heard of it before, but it's got about 400,000 people.

July 3

The Kerry Bog Village shows how life used to be in Ireland

Today I started off in Cardiff and was going to try to make it to Cardiff Bay, but it was too long of a walk. I decided to hang out at the city center, which is a shopping and restaurant area. Then I made it to Swansea, where I am now and will be making it over to Cork tonight. I'm on a ferry right now, which is the first time I've been on a ferry for passage. The rooms are small, but the ferry has a restaurant, a bar and a casino. Swansea wasn't really too much to look at. Cardiff seemed like a nicer place to be, Swansea seems more like a seaport town.

One of the things that the Cardiff Backpacker had was when they say breakfast included, they serve tea, but you make your own breakfast. They give you bread to make toast, and they also have free food there, it's just left over food for other travelers, like spaghetti to cook.

July 4
This morning I arrived in Cork at about 7:30 am. It was difficult to sleep in the ferry because of thin walls and it felt like sleeping in a waterbed. Once I did get used to it, I had a pretty good night's sleep. I got to Ireland and it was raining and green, just as I imagined Ireland. It's about 60 degrees with what the weatherman calls a refreshing wind, but I call a cold wind. I was able to find my hostel; I had that booked before. First, there was a big hill I had to go up, but I made it, left my luggage, and went back to the bus station for the Ring of Kerry tour.

I was going to go to Killarney as a separate trip, but since it's so close, I'll just spend two days in Cork and have a day trip to Killarney. I left at about 10 a.m. and got back about 10 p.m. I went through some of the various sights in Cork, worked through the Lee Valley, and then moved on to Killarney, which was really touristy.

But then we moved west about 105 miles around the ring, the ring actually starts by Killorglin. Killorglin has a three-day festival where they get really drunk in honor of a goat that they put on a pedestal. The reason for the goat is there's a lot of sheep and goat farming out in the area because there's no other kind of agriculture that can be done, just because of the mountainous area. Further, the goats were supposed to have come down from the mountains in a panic state and warned the locals that Cromwell was coming.

The beautiful, green Irish countryside

Then we moved south from Killorglin to Glenbeigh and stopped at the Kerry Bog Village, which showed how people lived in the old times. That was so-so, but I did take a couple of pictures there. Then we moved down to where Danny O'Connell was born, he's on the 20 pound Irish bill and was an early independence leader. We went to the Skellig Rocks, they're about 10 miles off the coast, but we couldn't see them because of the fog. We made it to Kenmare, which was a nice town and not quite as touristy as Killarney.

What sticks out is how green Ireland actually is. There are other things that stick out, a lot of the monuments, roadside monuments. About 99% were erected for the Irish independence movement. The rain and the fog and the mountain ranges were memorable also.

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