The trip to America was a huge success.  It went like clockwork and there were only a few times in the 2900 miles that Alan and I drove together in the car that were tense.  The one thing we omitted was the two days in Hot Springs, Arkansas between Atlanta and St. Louis.  It was going to be out of our way and cause two 8+ hour days of additional driving.  Instead, we headed direct to St. Louis from Atlanta via Nashville.  The only other change like that occurred at the end as we were returning to Washington. I thought I could do a 10 hour driving day just to get back to DC from Bloomington, Indiana but I didn't count on having to cross the Appalachian Mountains throughout West Virginia and long into Virginia.   I don't know what makes me so optimistic when I think about driving.  The highways through these particular mountains are all fast, filled with trucks, windy and treacherous.  We stopped after 6 hours and completed the final 5 the following morning.  The car was the biggest issue for me going in and I'm happy to say that I believe I've found a way to get myself in a better place on these long drives.  So that was a big goal achieved.

The remainder of this post is going to be just a summary of the days we spent, roughtly in order of their occurrence.

We arrived a few hours last into JFK on Monday, July 29th (my childhoold friend Linda Eisemann's birthday).  It's morning flight and you gain 5 hours going east so we got to New York in mid morning.  After renting the car, we headed for our hotel in Long Island City.  LIC is the place where both my parents emmigrated to from Ireland and all of their early history is steeped in the area.  It is still so familiar to me, although the residents have changed from mostly Irish to mostly Hispanic, although there are still many Irish in the area and they seem to get along.

After getting settled in the hotel for our one night stay, we connected with my niece Monique and her husband Jack to confirm our plan to meet them in a restaurant in Hicksville, Long Island that was about half the distance for both of us.  It was called Mio Posto and I'd definitely recommend it.  We had such a nice time with them, as usual.  I really like to keep up with their doings and hope that they will be able to come visit us here in Dublin.  We parted company around 11 and Alan and I headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep in order to face the drive to Washington as soon as rush hour in New York was over.

We left New York at about 10 on the 30th.  Traffic was pretty good all the way through although Alan hit some debris in the road and following that noticed that the gas guage didn't work.  We didn't know if the two were related or he didn't notice it before but it was something we definitely needed to have fixed and went to the Hertz place at National Airport to exhcange cars.   We arrived at our friends Mark and Judy's house around 3.  They had a nice dinner planned ad we spend our first evening catching up.

Three days in Washington, DC were spent mostly visiting our stuff in storage and buying more stuff.  Judy has a membership in Costco so we went there and really stocked up on stuff you can't get here (Q-Tips, tablet aspirin, and the like).  Our adventure there and elswhere is discount shopping land filled one of our extra suitcases.  The other was filled by stuff we took from storage.  We left those two suitcases at Mark & Judy's and headed for Atlanta on Friday after buying a new phone to use there.  This was important not only for the phone itself but now we have an American phone number as well.

Our first stop in Atlanta was a visit to Dorothy.  It was so, so good to see her and her parents.  I was also happy to see her nephew Nye.  Then we signed into the ASAE Annual Meeting convention and hotel downtown.  The Annual Meeting went very well for me and I saw lots of former colleagues.  Then on to Nashville, where we stayed for one night before moving on to Alan's family reunion in St. Louis. That was also great, three nights and two days of catching up.  What a pleasure.

Following St. Louis we went to Bloomington, Indiana, our new home in the United States.  There we signed a lease and did a few other things to establish residency there.  We also saw friends there and in Indianapolis.  I'm very happy with the idea of living again in Bloomington when we return, but it was there that we decided to remain in Ireland for yet another year.  Earlier this year we thought we'd leave here in June, 2014 but now it looks like it will be into 2015 at least, although now we're saying indefinitely.

After Bloomington we went back to Washington, with a stop overnight outside Charleston, WV.   We spend a nice three days with friends Irene & Craig.  Then departed again for New York and our final leg on the trip. We stayed at the same hotel in Long Island City and had dinner with a former colleague, Haisong, at The Grill Cafe in Bryant Park.  It was great to see Haisong doing so well!

Over the three weeks, we saw 50 or more friends and family and put 2900 miles on the rental car.  I only had two auto meltdowns and we made the big decision to stay another year in Ireland.  All in all a great trip.