The day was overcast and rainy.  This was the first rain in Napa in six months.  It seemed to be a foretaste of the weather we'd get in Europe. (Actually, we had relatively little rain during our trip.)  The rain though was a welcome reminder that the brown fields, hills and mountains around us would be turning green by the time we returned.

On the bus, Abigail and Mary Alice spent their time happily filling out Mad-Libs while I experimented with the digital camera I had bought the previous night in preparation for the trip.  Patrick was happy to look out the window and pose for pictures.

We arrived at the airport with enough spare time to have a small lunch before boarding our flight.  This was the first of four meals we would eat in the next 12 hours. Air France served us lunch right after takeoff, followed a couple of hours later by an early supper.  Since we would be losing nine hours during the eleven hour flight, we were then served breakfast several hours later as we were passing over Ireland.

In the few short hours that separated our early dinner (by Pacific Standard Time) and the late breakfast the next day (by Central European Time), each of us managed to get some small amount of sleep.  This was fortunate since we still had a good bit of traveling left before we could rest.

Our flight arrived at Charles de Gaulle about half an hour late so I hurried everyone along to the gate for our flight to Dublin.  Five minutes after we got to the gate, the flight was called for boarding.  Boarding, in this case meant crowding on to a bus for a twenty-minute ride to a remote corner of the airport where we queued up in the rain to board a BAE 148 commuter jet operated by the City Jet subsidiary of Air France.  This flight lasted only an hour and a half and was quite uneventful.  Mary Alice slept for most of the flight.

At the Dublin airport, we took a taxi to the hotel Mary had booked for us.  Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to get more information than the name of the hotel and its location, "near the Leeson Street Bridge".  The taxi driver drove up and down Leeson Street a few times before calling the depot to get directions.  The reason he had trouble finding it was that it is a small building on a quiet road just a short walk from the heavily traveled Leeson Street.

We quickly settled into our room on the top floor and awaited the return of Grandma and Granddad Callaghan.  They had arrived in Dublin the day before and were booked into a room on the floor below us.  They did return a short while later and soon we were heading off to see the newest member of the family - Cormac.