Texas – Caddo Lake

This is my first post about my home state, Texas!  As I detailed in a prior post, it’s not easy getting from Luxembourg to Texas.  I had taken two weeks off to be in Texas, spending one week with my family in Dallas and one week with my friends in Austin.  With my brother in California, my family tries to go on a family vacation every year or so.  My father had initially proposed going to Banff, but I was wary of adding another two flights onto my already packed itinerary.  So instead, we decided to go to Caddo Lake in East Texas.

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It’s just under a 3 hour drive from Dallas to Caddo Lake across some very flat and uninteresting plains.  When you get closer to the state border with Louisiana, the trees get taller, houses start showing up on stilts, and the cell signal gets worse.

It was pouring rain the evening we arrived at our Airbnb in the town of Karnack, where we discovered that not only did we not have cell service, we also didn’t have WiFi.  We were going to have a traditional, talk to your family kind of holiday!  Although, for the rest of the trip, we made a daily 20 mile drive to Marshall, Texas, so that my parents could check their hundreds of WeChat messages, my brother and I could download books and shows, and I could reassure Nico that I had not been eaten by gators.

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Dad was really excited to start fish immediately

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Ireland – Doolin, Limerick, Galway, & Whiskey

In September, Nico and I went to Newport, RI for his cousin’s wedding.  We were there for barely 48 hours, but it was my first time back in the US in 6 months, and this is what I realized that I missed the most (besides my friends and family, of course!): the ease and incredible selection when shopping for anything, the way restaurants give you a huge, free glass of water filled with ice without you even having to ask for it, and how friendly and chatty strangers are.

We flew from Dublin to Providence with Norwegian Air, which usually has really great deals between Europe and North America (I paid around $250 round trip, which was cheaper than my flight from Lux to Dublin lol).  As neither of us had been to Ireland before, of course we made a holiday out of it.

Day 1 – Doolin

We landed in Dublin jet lagged at 8am, picked up our rental car, and made it about 15 minutes before we had to stop at the nearest coffee shop to gather our wits.  Our ambitious plan was to drive 3 hours to a hostel in Doolin and then check out the Cliffs of Moher.  I’m lucky enough to be able to sleep on flights relatively easily, so I drove while tried to catch some Zs.

From our hotel in Doolin, we headed off on the Cliffs of Moher Walking Trail, but there is also a Hop On Hop Off bus that takes you straight to the visitor center and popular view points.

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So windy

Holy crap, it was so windy.  It’s a beautiful little hike, a bit muddy, and the waves crashing into the cliffs are awesome.  That day, it was so windy that the mist from the waves down below were being blown straight up.  The wind also literally blew me off my feet, and I tweaked my injured knee and didn’t get to finish the hike.

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Cliffs of Moher

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