Sir John Pentland Mahaffy once said, “In Ireland the inevitable never happens and the unexpected constantly occurs.”This would be how my trip to Ireland could be summed up. I went with four other American girls to Ireland for a week, which I knew would be unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced before we even left the Dublin airport.

I hadn’t booked accommodations for us in Ireland which included a tour throughout Galway, Castlebar and Dublin, planned by some of the other girls. All of these plans counted on us renting a car, which the girl who reserved it failed to realize that to rent it, you must be 27, which none of us were.

With this news we had acquired we started at that point to learn to deal with what Ireland gave us. We found a bus going to Galway, our first destination, leaving shortly. On this bus we met two Australians who not only ended up staying in our hostel, but in our room.

Hostels are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It consists of small rooms crammed with as many bunk beds as humanly possible. So, since we were not traveling with enough people to fill the whole room, naturally, the other beds were rented out to our new Australian friends.

The first night in Galway the five of us girls went to a pub where we took the recommendations of the two 60-year-old Irishmen and decided to visit the Aran Islands the next day. It is three islands off the west coast of Ireland. They told us not to go to the biggest one, being as its most touristy, but rather to the smallest one, Inis Oírr. So that’s what we did, and we were the only people there who were not natives.

This was one of my favorite days though; the first thing we saw when we arrived to the island was a bike rental shop. Naturally, since none of us have bikes in Brno, we rented them – best decision ever. We climbed on some ruins and this dog came up to us and we started to play with him and he ended up being our tour guide and hanging out with us for a few hours. We then found a ship wreck, where we sat on the coast and could see the Cliffs of Moher to our left and a sunset behind a lighthouse to our right.

We came back from the island exhausted, so we were walking back to our hostel when we were taken over by two men with a guitar, begging us to sing backup to Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” so we did. After we finished our rendition of the song, it turns out that it is a groom and his best man on the way to his stag (i.e. bachelor) party.

They invited us to dinner with them, so of course we went. It was a great time, and yet another opportunity to snag information from the locals as to what to do. The next city in our trip was Castlebar, which every Irish person laughed at when we said we were going there. The groom even offered to pay the deposit so we wouldn’t go.

Castlebar was exactly as predicted, boring and small. But we took a day trip to Westport and walked to the ocean one day. And the castle we stayed in was cheaper than a hostel, so it wasn’t that bad. The bartender at the pub in the hotel also poured my Guinness with a shamrock in the foam, which was amazing. Dublin was our last city and we got there the day before St. Patty’s, which was a blast!

Three of the girls went home the morning of St. Patty’s, leaving only Shannon and me for the rest of the trip. We went to the parade, a hurling match, which is, as an Irishwoman put it, “where you can go to see real Irishmen doing real work.” She was right, that was one of the most intense sports I’ve ever seen. Then we met up with the Australians we had met in Galway and went to the pubs for the night.

Shannon and I had gotten sick from one of the other girls with us so when our 3:45 a.m. wake-up call came for our flight home, needless to say, we didn’t. When we finally made it to the airport at about 8 a.m., we were both groggy and distressed. And we figured out how to get home from there. Ireland taught me that to plan less is better and to take what is given to you in stride.

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