Shannon Airport, again

Hmm thinks my loyal reader.
“Another Friday, another blog post from Chris. That must mean he is at the Shannon Airport again.”

Yep, the obligatory Shannon airport free internet blog post is here.

But Chris you ask, where are you going now? Weren’t you just in Rome last weekend and Venice two weekends before that and Prague in another two weeks? Don’t you just want to stay home and relax? Maybe play some Warcraft, watch a little footy on the telly at the pub?

While this might be true, but you forget to factor in one thing. Mrs. Tobin did not partake in the Rome trip and it turns out she was a little jealous. So this is what she planned.

Paty has a farewell lunch at the Brussels office on Tuesday, these are the people from her original Europe assignment, thus she is going to work Monday from Brussels. That leaves us with the weekend to spend somewhere close to Brussels.

So we are again partaking in the low cost phenomenon that is RyanAir and we are flying to Paris’s Beauvais airport. We will immediately rent a car from the company that will not be named on this blog (my grandma always said, ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!’) and are driving to Dijon tonight. We will stay in Dijon tonight and Saturday night. Tomorrow we have a wine tour in the Coits du Noit region of France. Basically the appellation outside of Dijon. Also if I am not mistaken, there is a good mustard factory in town!

Sunday we are driving back to the train station in Paris, Gar du Nord and dropping the car there. Then we catch the high speed train to Brussels where we will stay two nights at Paty’s usual hotel before heading back to Galway on Tuesday night.

Kind of like our own version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The timing of this trip isn’t the best, as the NCAA brackets come out on Sunday afternoon (Monday really early here), so I might be sad but there is a really good chance I will spend most of my free time in Brussels holed up in my hotel room studying and trying to defend my bracket title, again. The Tobin family has won the Embo pool (50+ players) 5 of the last 6 years.

It is going to be really hard to defend the title this year. I looked at the ESPN website earlier today and thought that hell might have frozen over. Why you ask? WSU had a single digit in front of their box score and it looks like UW is wishing just to host an NIT game, while Duke is a ‘bubble team’?

It just makes the WSU/UW game at Hec Ed next year that much better. Yes, for those of you wondering, I am renewing my season tickets. Hopefully things will be back to normal when I am back in town!