One of the most challenging nights I ever had to endure while I was travelling the world with my two teenagers was a 15-hour overnight bus journey through India.
It was not that it was boiling hot; that was combatted by sliding the skinny top windows open.
Nor was it the fact that it was horrendously noisy; I have headphones which magically turns the hooting of motorbike horns into soothing upside-down yoga music.
It wasn’t even that there wasn’t a great deal of privacy; the flimsy piece of material that the Indian bus company tried to pass off as curtains could be pegged together at one end – helping to block out most of the light.
No.
The reason that that overnight bus journey was so torturous for my family and I was that we didn’t have our own pillows.
While every woman needs a purse for travel, ideally, we would prefer not to look (or feel) as though we are lugging around some ugly cumbersome (achy shoulder) carry-all that is housing the entire contents of the top drawer in our kitchen.
Ireland is about as down to earth as it gets. If you are wondering what to pack for Ireland then please; leave the frilly, flouncy and silky items to other parts of Europe and think rugged, real and understatedly gorgeous.
Earthy. Green. Sea-Salty. Wild. Ready.
They are the words that describe a woman who is about to visit Ireland.
A woman who doesn’t have to shout about how beautiful she is. She just is so deal with it.
Either you can ease yourself into it nice and gently, have no expectations and experience the best three weeks of your life
or
you save up all year, get stressed out of your brain, worry about anything and everything, freak out because the kids aren’t as excited as they should be and then return home two weeks later feeling broke, frazzled and quite frankly, exhausted.
Remember when rain ponchos were the ugliest thing in the world?
Long, plastic, see-through monstrosities that only someone very desperate to keep dry would wear?
Well, lucky for us travellers, things have moved along in the world of ponchos and now we are searching out the best rain ponchos on the market so we too can stay dry and look utterly stylish too!
