111 Days - Ireland Bound

I booked my ticket across the pond tonight. In April of 2011 I'll be leaving New York City and heading to Shannon, Ireland aboard Continental airlines. My friend Andy is living near Shannon with his girlfriend right now (she's in med school over there), and I told him recently here in Chilliwack that I'd like to come for a visit. So, now it's official! While I'm not much of a golfer, I'm eager to play a game of golf with Andy in Ireland, for the geography alone.

I really haven't seen much of Europe. I spent a week in northern Finland at Nokia a few years ago, and had a brief stop over in Helsinki. Other than that, and about 6 hours of time I had in London, I haven't seen anything else. So my plan is to spend April until June or July bouncing around Europe with a backpack.

My open jaw ticket from Vancouver to Buenos Aires to New York cost me about $1,000, and my flight to Ireland cost me $550. So in total, I've spent about $1,550, which is pretty cheap considering that those flights represent about 36 hours of flying and three different continents.

I was pricing out tickets in Europe, and it's so cheap it's almost an embarrassment to all North American airlines. For example, a flight from Shannon, Ireland to London costs 5 Euros plus taxes, which works out to about $35 CAD. So rest assured I plan to milk that winged cow all the way across Europe while I'm there.

Countries I'll definitely visit are Ireland, Britain, Serbia and France. If I get a chance, I'd like to also visit Spain (since I'm hoping my spanish will be pretty good by the time I leave Buenos Aires), Italy, and the Czech Republic. But we'll see.

Anyways, I'm $1,500 into this already, so there's no going back now!

Photo by Michalo on Flickr